If you have a list of 10k subscribers or more, you can’t reach them out manually or on a one-to-one basis.
You need to send bulk emails.
In this article, we will walk you through what bulk emails are, their types and benefits, and the best practices when sending them.
What is bulk email?
Bulk email, also known as email blasts or mass emails, refers to an email sent to a large group of individuals at once.
Its sole aim is to advertise the products and services of a brand or maintain customer relations.
In other words, the marketer creates one message and sends them all out at once as part of the email campaign.
Some examples of emails that are sent include newsletters, email marketing promotions, notifications, news bulletins, mailing list discussions, scheduled publications, and more.
What are the types of bulk emails?
There are four types of bulk emails you can send to boost sales.
Newsletters
Acquisition emails
Promotional emails
Retention emails
1 - Newsletters
A newsletter is a type of bulk email that businesses use to keep their customers and subscribers updated about the business and its services.
Newsletters mainly include insights, guides, reports, and thought leadership on a given topic that the recipient has initially subscribed for.
2 - Acquisition emails
An acquisition email is another type of bulk email sent to people who probably didn’t opt-in to your contact list using signup forms.
The usual scenario is that you get a list for a provider like ZoomInfo and decide to send them targeted emails in a bit to turn them from prospects into customers.
Acquisition emails include outbound emails, mass emails, or even LinkedIn Outreach — and also qualify as transactional emails.
3 - Promotional emails
Promotional emails or transactional emails offer advanced email personalization options. Not all your contacts receive promotional emails.
You usually send this type of bulk email to people who opted into your contact list using subscription forms or existing customers.
You can send promotional bulk email blasts depending on seasonality (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Thanksgiving) or based on someone's behavior (they visited your pricing page more times than usual).
4 - Retention emails
This type of bulk email campaign aims at encouraging existing customers to keep purchasing and stay loyal to your brand.
Some transactional emails qualify as retention emails and help business improve their customer loyalty, boost their margins and improve their Net Promoter Score.
Ways to send a bulk email
There are two ways of sending mass emails:
Legitimate mass emails
Unsolicited mass emails
1 - Legitimate bulk emails
When a business sends an email to a person that has purchased their products or services, such email is called a bulk email.
However, a bulk email qualifies as a legitimate one if it meets these criteria:
The recipients gave their consent.
The name of the business is clearly displayed.
The email consists of an “unsubscribe” button.
It sends out emails at regular intervals.
Once the bulk email meets all these criteria, it becomes an effective email marketing strategy for the business that uses it.
2 - Unsolicited bulk email
As its name implies, these are emails sent to people without their consent.
Other notable features of this type of bulk email marketing include:
Absence of an unsubscribe button
Contains marketing messages that aren't personalized.
This type of email is sent through mail merge to people who never asked to be in your contact list.
Why is sending bulk emails important?
Bulk email marketing remains a valid way for any business to connect with their new and existing customers within the shortest time possible.
But there are other benefits to this type of email campaign.
Here are four benefits of sending bulk email campaigns to your subscribers.
It is cost effective
Bulk email marketing is less expensive for the brand.
Most email marketing software charge per number of emails you send. That means the more email campaigns you send, the more money you pay.
The advantage of mass email is that you can disseminate tons of information to a large number of people at once, making the entire process more efficient for marketers.
Plus, there are tons of email marketing tools with the option of a free bulk email service you can leverage to send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts.
It is easy to create and distribute
Most bulk email providers already have tons of email templates designed for marketers. These tools also support drag and drop editor, which makes it easy to craft a mass email.
Also, the way these tools work is pretty straightforward. You input your contacts in a database and then create fields like "First name," "Company name," or "last name."
You then use these customer details to craft targeted messages that contain custom variables like the ones above and use mail merge to deploy the emails.
It encourages personalized messages
Bulk email marketing allows businesses to send out personalized emails to their audience.
This is possible since bulk email senders can segment their customer data into smaller groups and obtain relevant information relating to the customers.
For instance, the bulk email marketing service can provide customized information, such as a customer’s purchase history, their metadata, and more.
With this piece of information, the senders can tailor and send out customized marketing messages that suit the needs of the customers.
It supports regular communication
Since bulk emails are easy to create and distribute, marketers can reach out to their subscribers as they want.
Using marketing automation to implement an automated process, marketers can keep in touch with their customers weekly or every two weeks without facing any obstacles.
If they want to do more than that, they can. But it is often advised not to send out emails more than once a week.
Do bulk emails work?
Mass emails do work. Just as there are two sides to a coin, a bulk email also has its pros and cons.
Let’s take a look at some of these pros and cons.
Pros
Sending email blasts provides you with lots of advantages. First, you can use and reuse email templates every time.
Second, there's no limit to the number of mass emails you can send. Your reach is as big as how big your list is and how often you want to keep in touch with your email subscribers.
You can also send personalized emails by using custom variables within your email subject line and email copy.
Another advantage is that it's easy to create mass messages even with a regular email marketing platform. Most of these tools have a drag and drop editor you can use to craft emails fast.
Tools like Excel or Google Spreadsheet offer free bulk email service, enabling most people to run and schedule multiple campaigns in an intuitive way.
Cons
The disadvantages of sending out mass emails fall into two categories.
First, you can end up over-generalizing your messages, making you send irrelevant messages to your audience.
To prevent this from happening, you can consider obtaining a lot of information about your subscribers.
Little actions, such as personalizing messages with the recipient’s name or including demographic information, can make a huge difference.
The other issue is that it makes it easy to get flagged as spammers and hard to get past spam filters.
Spam filters were specifically built to prevent unethical companies from swamping subscribers’ inboxes with emails.
You can prevent this from happening to you by gaining authority from your recipients and your email service providers (ESPs).
You can also check through your bounced emails to find patterns and spam words in the rejected ones and look at guidelines to prevent such errors.
By doing this, you increase your open and click-through rate and add more credibility to your reputation.
Five best practices for sending bulk emails
If you want to achieve positive results from your bulk email marketing, then you can’t send emails anyhow you like.
Here are five best practices when sending bulk emails to your subscribers.
1 - Send your emails to “only subscribers”
Before you send your emails out, ensure that you have obtained consent from your audience.
The truth is nobody likes to receive emails they don’t remember signing up for. You need to obtain your subscriber’s consent to make your email marketing effective.
Obtaining your email lists from business cards or purchasing them from third-party sources can lead to serious consequences.
If you fail to obtain clear consent, the “subscribers' ' could mark your emails as spam and unsubscribe en masse.
This can do harm to your sender score and reduce the chances of sending emails to your customer’s inbox.
2 - Ensure a good sender’s reputation
As a sender, you have to perform some actions to ensure that your email marketing campaigns become a success.
Here are some tips that can help:
Check your sender score: Your sender score is the rating email servers use to decide what to do with your email.
The lower the score, the higher the chance your email will get sent to your subscriber’s promotional or spam folder rather than the inbox.
Authenticate your emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to establish credibility and deliver the emails to the recipients’ inboxes.
Avoid sending emails from no-reply addresses so that you can hear from your audience and communicate with them when they have problems.
3 - Clean up your list
Cleaning up your list implies going through your list and updating it.
Remove invalid or inactive email addresses that don’t hear from you anymore and could end up increasing your bounce rate.
Also, cleaning up your list ensures you don’t get marked as a spammer and will deliver your email to the right people that will engage with your emails.
4 - Craft compelling messages
Since you have put efforts into ensuring your emails hit people’s inboxes, it is time to create effective messages that guarantee success. To do this, make sure you:
Personalize subject lines or messages.
Create subject lines that catch the readers’ attention.
Create concise email copies.
Include a clear call-to-action (CTA).
Include the unsubscribe link to allow your audience to opt-out.
5 - Evaluate your results
Before you send your emails en masse to your subscribers, you can consider A/B testing your emails to determine the variable that will create a better impact.
After that, you can measure the metrics to ascertain whether you made your marketing efforts successful or not.
Monitor and evaluate metrics such as the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, or and conversion rate.
Five features your bulk email service provider should have
Many email marketing platforms offer bulk email services. However, the best email service
providers must have the tools that make the process of creation, sending, and delivery seamlessly possible.
The tools you should look out for before patronizing an email service provider include:
Premade, mobile-responsive email templates
The email templates enable you to craft relevant messages for your subscribers that fits into the screen size of all devices.
Drag and drop builder
This allows you to send beautiful emails that reach your audience within the shortest time possible.
Design and spam checks
This ensures your emails don't get marked as spam and enables you to see how it shows up in the inbox.
Engagement features
It enables you to see your active subscribers and those who should be cleaned from your lists.
Email tracking and analytics
Detailed reporting tools help you to track your email marketing campaign performance over time.
Five bulk email tools you can use as a bulk email sender
Here are five bulk email tools you can use to send email blasts.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a great tool to send email campaigns while taking into account your sender reputation, email deliverability, and customers inboxes.
This tool makes email creation easy and has key features that make email automation easy.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is another tool that lets you send bulk transactional emails to targeted segments and generate leads.
Just like ActiveCampaign, it has a sales CRM that helps users know which leads is ready to buy and which are still in discovery mode.
SendX
Want to send a bulk transactional email but don't have a huge budget? SendX paid plans are very affordable.
It lets you send bulk emails in high volume and only charge you a fraction of what most tools charge. The free plan lets you send targeted email messages per month while keeping email deliverability in mind.
Mailchimp
Probably the most popular email software, Mailchimp also has a free plan that makes it easy to an create drag and drop email or a transactional email.
It's similar to Constant Contact in that it offer email marketing features on top of marketing automation and sales automation. The paid plans are great and affordable for midsize businesses.
Mailgun
Mailgun's free plan lets you tons of send bulk emails per month using their drag and drop email builder. The professional plan let's you build landing pages at your will.
It also support an SMTP API that makes it easy to send emails that don't go to SPAM.
Key Takeaways
Bulk email refers to emails sent to a large number of individuals at once.
Bulk emails are easy to create and distribute while fostering regular communication with your subscribers.
Before patronizing any email service provider, ensure they have the five tools mentioned above to send bulk emails efficiently.
