If you are a marketing professional, or you have your own online business, and you manage this area and many others, we are sure that you have tried to send mass mailings to your contact list more than once. Sometimes it has worked, sometimes it hasn’t… and that’s why you are here.
In this article, we are going to explain how to send mass mailings properly and not waste your and your subscribers’ time and effort, by possibly wrong actions.
Summary
- To send mass mailings, it is important to have a program with adequate functionality that fits your sending needs.
- It is always necessary to count on professionals specialized in data protection to avoid getting into a mess and to be able to send our mass mailings with peace of mind.
- We must personalize our emails and write them in a specific way to ensure that they reach the inbox of our subscribers and do not end up in SPAM.
What you should know about sending mass mailings
Many people tend to believe that mailing and mass mailing is done without the consent of the recipients, or that it is an inappropriate type of mailing for their business. But the truth is that it can generate great results, and it is one of the high-impact types of Internet advertising(1):
- SEO and SEM.
- Social networks.
- Mass mailing campaigns.
- Virtual directories.
- Cross-linking alliances.
In reality, mailing is the best tool to convince your subscriber and sell. In addition, the mass mailing comes from a list of contacts who have voluntarily agreed to receive these messages.
Emails that the contact has neither requested nor allowed are negative for your business and will be catalogued as SPAM for the most part.
How to send personalized mass mailings?
Personalizing an email helps you to adjust the content of your emails for sending them to your subscribers according to the stage they are in your sales funnel or according to the personal information of your subscribers in the contact list.
The idea is that the personalized content will generate a link and prevent them from deleting your email as soon as they receive it or going straight to spam the next time.
There are multiple ways to personalize an email. The best known and simplest is to indicate the subscriber’s name, since it gives them understanding that you are contacting them in a personal way and that you are paying attention to them.
Other ways are to pay attention to the subscriber’s age when generating the content, their gender and even the country.
How to send mass mailings without spamming?
The main limitation of e-mail marketing is the need for prior permission from customers to receive information through this channel. In this way, the customer does not consider the receiving of your e-mail as an invasion, but as personalised attention to the offered service (2).
The spam phenomenon is perhaps one of the main and most dangerous threats to the future of the information society. It has become an economic issue, and international organizations such as the OECD are concentrating their efforts on finding a solution to it (3).
It is ideal that you do not include too many capital letters or exclamations because not only do they have negative connotations on the Internet (capital letters = shouting) but the mail system that your subscriber uses can catalogue your mail as SPAM and make it never reach who you want it to reach.
For example, in Spain, this SPAM phenomenon was regulated for the first time in the Law 34/2002 of July 11, 2002 on Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce (4).
The first unsolicited mass mailings on the Internet originated in discussion forums, where some users posted the same message in several discussion forums, causing users participating in multiple discussions to see the same message on several occasions (5).
How to send mass mailings with different attachments?
When sending mass mailings, the idea is not to attach files. Sending a heavy attachment can cause failures and, above all, can use up your sending limit very quickly.
You can consider using an application such as Dropbox or Drive. It allows you to send to your contacts links, which will take them to the file download page.
How to send advertising mass mailings?
When it comes to sending mass mailings, you have to take into account a very important detail: data protection. It is essential that you respect the GDPR, as non-compliance can lead to heavy penalties.
The GDPR prohibits commercial communications by e-mail or equivalent electronic means of communication (6).
In order to send commercial communications, you must be clear that you are using a personal database, which may contain sensitive user data that deserves protection. If you are going to advertise or offer your services by mailing, keep in mind that you can only do so if:
- You are targeting a company or individual who is already your customer. This implies that there is already a contractual relationship between your company and the other party.
- Your mail contains services or products that are similar to those previously contracted by your client. You cannot send them commercial e-mails about anything you want.
In addition to all this, you must keep in mind that everyone has rights regarding their data and, therefore, your users:
- They may or may not consent to the collection of and access to their personal data. This implies that you can’t collect data from people autonomously because you find them on the Internet.
- They have the right to decide how you are going to treat this personal data. How you are going to store it and how you are going to treat it.
- They must have access to information on the uses of their data by third parties with whom you collaborate, and they will know their information. They should be able to know at all times who has that personal data and what they are using it for.
- They can demand the cancellation of their data and information. The permission they have given you is not irrevocable.
It is a good idea to hire a specialist to help you put in order the legal part of sending mailings. Once you are clear on these points, you can start sending your mass mailings without any worries.
Advantages of automation in a mass mailing campaign
Time is one of the main currencies of exchange for work or activities nowadays. We are always thinking about how fast it goes by, and how long it will take us to do something. It is essential that in online processes we invest as little time as possible to get good results in return.
This makes us efficient, and one way to generate efficient processes in our online business or activities is to have automation. Automation requires a fleet of tools and applications that work for you.
In this article you will find a list of the main email marketing tools that exist, so you can decide which one is the best for you and start sending mass mailings.
Before starting with the list of tools, it is important that you know why it is essential to have these tools and what benefits it brings you to the automation of your email marketing strategy and therefore, the automation of sending mass mailings.
What are the benefits of automating your mass mailing?
- Saving time and resources.
- Increased possibility of generating sales.
- Improved segmentation of your databases.
- Obtaining better measurement metrics.
- Possibility to personalize messages without spending more time per user. This allows you to impact the user according to their interaction as well.
The data speaks for itself. According to Statista analysis:
- The number of email users worldwide is 4.14 billion.
- The number of emails sent and received per day worldwide is 319.6 million.
- The amount of email marketing revenue worldwide is 8.49 million.
The great marketing theorists envisioned from the origin of the Internet a new medium
through which brands could establish a relationship with their consumers (7)
Classical marketing understood that the principles of the 4P’s (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) had to be adapted to the medium, and this was possible through the development of websites, placing online advertisements and promotions, creating or participating in web communities and using mass mailings (8).
Good and bad practices in sending mass mailings
In this section, we are going to look at a table with the main practices, good and bad, when sending mass mailings.
| Good practices sending mass mailings | Bad practices when sending mass mailings |
|---|---|
| Revise the words that compose the personalized field to avoid speaking feminine and masculine at the same time: Welcome Andrea. | Misuse of custom fields. The subscriber may make a mistake when entering his name and it will be fatal to see him wrong all the time. |
| Send files through links and not attachments. | Putting too many images or not being careful with your processor, since sometimes they are not seen in the mail. |
| Be clear and concise with the content. | Putting filler content that does not contribute anything that lengthens the email. |
| Generate your own database and organize it | Buying databases instead of generating your own. |
The best programs for sending mass mailings
1. Mailchimp
This tool is an integrated marketing platform that allows its users to generate emails and automations. This activity, which incorporates expert advice, will help you generate more orders through activities such as reactivating customers with abandoned carts, capturing lost customers or cross-selling products.
Mailchimp has among its outstanding features a fantastic team that will provide you with technical support for your responses. In addition, it presents you with various marketing resources that will be useful to you. It also offers an expert mentoring program through which you could work with a Mailchimp partner.
In addition to all of the above, Mailchimp is positioned as one of the best tools for sending your mass mailings, as it has more than 300 application integrations so you can send more targeted campaigns by connecting your ideal applications.
With this tool you have a free plan that contains all these features:
- Marketing CRM.
- Creative Assistant.
- Website builder.
- Mailchimp mastery.
- Landing pages and forms.
When you upgrade to a higher plan, the possibilities are endless:
- Email templates and landing pages.
- Customer journey builder.
- Customized corporate image.
- A/B testing.
- 24/7 email and chat support.
And a long etc of functionalities as you upgrade to each plan up to premium.
2. SendInBlue
This tool contains multiple functionalities, among which stands out one that is very interesting and that the others do not have: SMS Marketing. This allows you to communicate in a more direct way with your customers to receive urgent messages or specific offers.
In addition, it has a chat through which you can connect live with your customers to solve their doubts and concerns when they browse your website. And of course, the tool contains the essential element of mail creation and tray organization.
3. MailRelay
This tool allows you to send mass mailings with the possibility of controlling the whole process by means of:
- Impressions.
- Geographic statistics.
- Clicks.
- Subscriber activity.
As a plus, MailRelay has its own IP ranges and uses its own technologies to improve the delivery rate of email marketing campaigns automatically in the inbox. This helps to prevent your email from going to the spam folder.
Other features of this tool are:
- Personalized content.
- Scheduled delivery.
- A/B tests.
- RRSS campaigns.
- Contact segmentation.
- Personalized fields.
4. Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign is positioned as the best email marketing platform, because it not only provides you with the email marketing tools, but also contains the best marketing automation and CRM tools to create a satisfying customer experience.
That is, it not only focuses on the processes of sending emails, but seeks to create a better customer experience. This allows you to improve your relationship with your audience through personalized targeting and help them know what you can offer them to meet their needs.
If you take a look at their website, you will see a section where they talk about customer experience. They talk about reaching the customer, nurturing the customer, convincing the customer and growing the customer list.
Want to know some of their tools? Here you have all of them:
- Email list segmentation.
- Site tracking.
- Marketing automation.
- Text messaging and SMS marketing.
- Automation roadmap.
- Automation goals.
- Website event monitoring.
- Facebook Custom Audiences.
- Sales CRM with automation.
- Software to align marketing and sales.
- A/B testing.
- Predictive Sending.
How to send mass mailings successfully
When it comes to sending mass mailings, we have two options:
- Send through traditional messaging services.
- Send through email marketing tools.
With traditional messaging services we do not mean postal mail, but services such as Gmail, Outlook… These services are the most common, but in truth, they are not so ideal for sending mass mailing campaigns, as they usually end up in the SPAM folder because they are more used to sending personal or work messages.
That is why if you want to send mass mailings successfully you must choose a good program for it. So your first step should be to decide which specialized email marketing software you are going to use to send your mass mailings. You can find this out in the following points of this article.
But first of all, here are some other points to take into account when planning a successful bulk email campaign:
- Obtain in a legal and appropriate way the email addresses of your users.
- Personalize all the messages you send based on your users.
- Check your emails before sending them.
- Analyze the results of your first campaigns in order to improve the next ones.
Conclusion
Creating an email marketing strategy will help you keep your subscribers in touch with your brand, persuade them to be more willing to purchase, and allow you to generate an enriched database of your own.
When you prepare your email marketing campaign by sending mass mailings, you will be unifying the processes to be more efficient. If you do it right and your customers receive an email at the right time, you may get new purchases.
Don’t waste any more time and start preparing your emails to make a successful mailing campaign. We look forward to hearing about your results. And remember, well-done mass mailings are not spam, so don’t be afraid and start creating your campaign.
