What is Mass Email? How To Send Personalized Mass Emails in Gmail?

Gmail is an extensively used email platform. This free email service provider has 1.9 billion active users worldwide, with the highest number of them in India. People often use it for sending emails to individual contacts. But do you know that businesses use it for sending mass email as well?  

Read on to know how you can send mass emails with Gmail and why it’s better to use a dedicated software solution like NotifyVisitors. 

What is mass email?

Mass email, which is also referred to as bulk email, is the sending of promotional email campaigns to a big list of contacts in one single operation. Your contact list can be your customer base, leads, subscribers, etc. whose email ids you’d have collected through lead forms and other sources. 

Businesses send mass emails to hundreds or even thousands of users simultaneously to accomplish a particular objective such as communicating important information or promoting a product/service. Email marketing never fades as a digital marketing trend.

What are the different types of mass emails that businesses send?

Mass emails are sent for different purposes like sending out email invitations, making announcements, reaching out to leads, and nurturing customer relationship. Based on their objective, mass emails are classified into the following four basic types.

1. Acquisition emails:

These are emails sent to qualified leads in the user journey to convert them into prospects and then into customers. These may contain invitations to webinars, case studies, samples, etc. to help leads better understand an offering of theirs. 

2. Promotional emails:

They present deals and offers and have captivating calls to action. These are sent to customers or subscribers who are likely to be interested in a particular item. 

3. Newsletters:

These emails provide general info about what’s trending in your company and industry. They aim at building brand awareness and credibility and delivering value to users. They do not contain sales pitches. 

4. Retention emails:

These are emails focusing on nurturing customer relationships soon after closing a deal. These have content delivered to users based on different marketing funnel stages. These increase brand affinity and lay the foundation for running successful referral program. These can therefore take shapes like upselling efforts, requesting feedback, asking for recommendations, etc. 

Brands and businesses that market themselves through emails shouldn’t miss out on any of these bulk email types. This is because all of them are vital for creating brand awareness and improving sales.

How to send personalized mass emails in Gmail?

You can send a mass personalized email to the contacts in your Gmail account using Gmail and my Gmail extension. Simply get all the email addresses in the “To” field. Then write your “message” and its “subject”. Once you’ve completed doing these and you’re happy with your copy, just click the “GMass” button (and not the “Gmail Send” button). 

There are three different ways to get that “Compose” window with your big list of email addresses. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. 

1. The GMass “Build Email List” button technique

If you’re familiar with Gmail, you’ll be acquainted with how you can search through your email and chat interactions using the “Search” bar functionality. Use it to find a list of matching interactions. Now, use the GMass “Build Email List” button to collect all the email ids within those matching interactions (in the “From” and “To” lines).

For instance, if you’d like to send a mass email to those contacts with whom you’ve interacted about “recent arrivals”, just search for the phrase “recent arrivals” in my Gmail account, and then click the GMass “Build Email List” button. This will immediately come up with a list of all those email ids.

In case you want to have all of your contacts in your mass email sending list, search with a commonly occurring word like “the”, “you”, “for”, or “of”. Since almost every mail will have these words, the “Build Email List” button will come up with an email list of all the email ids in your account. 

Once you’ve built your email list this way, a “Gmail Compose window” having all the IDs in the “To” line will open. Now, write a personalized Subject and Message, and then click the GMass button. This will send your email to every address on the list. 

The advantage of this technique is that it is easy to do, can be performed through the Gmail interface, and doesn’t require importing/ exporting. Its disadvantage is that you may not successfully find all the email ids in your account. Further, the search functionality is restricted to a maximum of 5,000 messages.

2. The Google Contacts method

In this method, you’ll be using Google Contacts using the Google Contacts Interface to filter out some or all of your contacts. Here’s how you do it.

First, select “Contacts” in the Gmail interface’s upper-left menu. Then, go to the list of Contacts. Use the checkbox tool to select all of the contacts, and then tap on the “Email” tab. However, this will select only the contacts on the page you’re currently in. For collecting the other pages of contacts, you need to do those page by page. 

Now launch Contacts from within Gmail. After this, type your email message and click the “GMass” button (not the “Send” button). This will send your personalized mass emails to all recipients. 

There’s another method where you can launch Google Contacts in another window. Here, you need to visit straight in the browser. This technique isn’t as favored as the previous one as selecting too many contacts will lead to the failure of the “Email” button.

The advantage of this mass email sending technique is that it’s easy to do. Further, if you go by the Google Contact method, you’ll enjoy the benefit of sending a mass email to just the preferred segment of people as Google Contacts are usually grouped into logical segments of people.

The con is that if you select a lot of contacts at once, you’ll be shown an error message rather than the launching of the Gmail Compose window. Further, it displays only 250 contacts per page and doesn’t allow you to select Contacts across different pages.

3. The Google Docs spreadsheet method

This method involves exporting the email ids of your choice from Google Contacts into a Google Docs spreadsheet. Here is how you do it. 

First, go to “Google Contacts”, then select some or all of your contacts there to a CSV file.

Then, select “Export” and then select those Contacts to export. Now, upload the CSV file into a spreadsheet in Google Docs.

Once you’ve created the spreadsheet, delete the irrelevant, empty columns. This will help remove extra data in your spreadsheet that can hinder processing by GMass. 

No, connect to the spreadsheet using GMass. The “Compose” window will launch. It’ll have all the email ids in its “To” line. In case there are over 1,000 ids, GMass will consolidate those into an “alias” id, representing all the chosen ids.

Now click the GMass button to send a personalized email to all the IDs in the “To” line. If you end up clicking the Gmail Send button instead of GMass, it will send the email to all recipients, revealing all the ids in the “To” line to one another.

The advantage of this method is that you can mass email to every email id in your Google Contacts. However, not all email addresses you’ve sent/received an email to/from maybe your Google Contact. Another demerit is that this method requires you to put in the most effort.

Why should you go for a dedicated software solution over Gmail for sending mass emails?

Here are the reasons why you should use a dedicated software solution like NotifyVisitors over Gmail for sending mass emails.

1. Limited messages:

Gmail mass limits the number of emails you can send using it to 500 contacts in 24 hours. This restricts the number of people you can reach out to through email marketing.

2. No statistics:

Gmail won’t give you any analytic information of your mass email marketing effort in terms of their deliverability, impact, etc. So, you won’t be able to evaluate the ROI, derive valuable insights on what works and what doesn’t, and thereby, improve your future campaigns.

3. Risk of exposing sensitive data:

With Gmail, there are chances where carelessness can reveal your list of email subscribers to others. 

4. Lack of interaction-based segmentation:

Gmail doesn’t allow you to segment your audience based on their online behavior. Such market segmentation is essential for efficient marketing today. 

5. Campaign scheduling is not possible:

Gmail doesn’t facilitate the convenient scheduling of your email campaigns during non-working hours to appropriately reach users in different time zones. You also won’t be able to send automated emails. 

6. Personalization difficulty:

In Gmail, you can personalize your emails only with the use of additional tools that are not only priced but also have their own set of restrictions with regards to the number of daily email messages. 

7. Low deliverability:

Gmail doesn’t save your messages from being sent to Spam. This affects the deliverability of your mass emails.

All these disadvantages of sending mass emails in Gmail, get eliminated when you use a dedicated email service like NotifyVisitors. It supports migration, has a Gmail extension, facilitates versatile email segmentation, enables email marketing automation, allows effective contact management, provides detailed analytics, and more. 

Conclusion

Sending a personalized mass email in Gmail isn’t difficult. And there are several procedures to achieve it. This blog has discussed each of those in detail. However, we also suggest that brands and businesses don’t use Gmail for sending bulk emails to save costs.

This is because of the numerous disadvantages associated with it. We recommend that you use a dedicated email service like NotifyVisitors. 

FAQs

1. What is mass email?

Mass email, which is also referred to as bulk email, is the sending of promotional email campaigns to a big list of contacts in one single operation. Your contact list can be your customer base, leads, subscribers, etc. whose email ids you’d have collected through lead forms and other sources. 

2. What are the different types of mass email?

Here are 4 types of mass email that you can send:

• Acquisition emails
• Newsletters
• Promotional emails
• Retention emails

Also Read:

• Best Time to Send an Email Newsletter to Improve Campaign Performance
• What is an Email Blast? How to Create and Send it (Top 5 Examples)
• Email Autoresponder – Automate the process of Conversion
• 19 Best Email Marketing Software and Tools
• How to Choose Email Marketing Software for Your Business?