The 2023 Guide to Bulk Emailing - Tips and Tools
There were about 4 billion people using emails as of 2020 and the number is expected to well surpass 4.5 billion by 2025. What’s more revealing is that around 86% of all professionals label email as their primary channel of communications for all things business. So, if you are somehow able to land your email in the inbox of these professionals, you can trust it to convert into a very plausible sales channel. Now this goldmine is sure to attract a lot of hunters, and it does rightly so. To tackle this issue, many email service providers scan your emails and make sure that dubious emails are marked as spam and never trouble the inbox of their users.
So, sending bulk emails in this highly regulated space becomes challenging. This has given rise to a different niche industry of email automation in the IT and automation sector. But, before looking at the best-in-class tools that can help you send bulk emails efficiently let us look at what it actually means and what are the best practices.
Bulk Emails, what exactly?
Just like its name, sending bulk emails means that you are sending one single email to a multitude of potential prospects at once. It can be either informationals, press releases, promotions, information about a new product launch, invitations, etc. The aim of sending bulk emails is to get a piece of information to millions of people all at one time.
Now there are also sub-divisions in how you can send these emails. You either send one email to everyone in your mailing list or you can choose to send a private email to a portion of your subscribers which can include time-sensitive information or people sensitive updates. Experts often say that personalization is the key to reach the core of prospects and improve the effectiveness of your emails.
1. By using bulk emailing practices, you can reach a vast audience in a short period of time at minimal cost.
2. Your potential customers would be able to access your emails from the place of their convenience as emails are available on mobile devices, so you also get direct access to your customers as against other channels of advertising.
3. If you use comprehensive bulk emailing tools, you’d get intelligible insights into your campaign about your open rates, delivery rates, click hotspots, open time, and many more to form your further emailing strategies.
Difference between Bulk Emails and other forms of Emails
1. Cold emails aim to have a more direct impact on the potential customer and are usually sent on a one-to-one basis, whereas marketing/bulk emailing is the overarching technique used to creatively increase brand awareness, develop consumer faith, build trust and give loyal services to existing and potential customers.
2. There is a huge difference in terms of recipients between the two types of emailing methods. In cold emails, you proactively choose your recipients as against in bulk emails where you usually have a list of subscribers who have opted-in to your mailing list.
3. Design department also has some stark differences. Bulk emails are preferentially HTML templates and have more poster-banner feel to them. Cold emails on the other hand look more direct and have text content in predominance.
4. We can say that in terms of goal, cold email is more direct and aims to establish a direct channel of business relationship but bulk emailing tries to focus more on developing brand awareness so that when the need comes, the potential customer would reach out.
5. Speaking in terms of volume, you can send a maximum of 100 cold emails in a day, but while sending bulk emails if you use the right tools, then you can easily send to thousands of potential users in your mailing list at one go.
6. In terms of frequency, since delivery rates are relatively low in bulk emails, you can send them more frequently because the prospects in your mailing list are probably expecting you to send emails to them. But for cold emails, the ball game is totally different and the less you send, the more positive your approach looks.
1. Transactional emails are sent to communicate something specific and have a set purpose, bulk emails even though they do have a lot of purpose, there is no set expected response and there can be a varied set of responses to a particular email from different potential prospects.
2. Bulk emails are a little less personalized as compared to transactional emails but both of them have elements which are adjusted on a case by case basis.
3. There is a lot of thought that goes into making sure that your email does not land in spam folders while sending bulk emails. So, there is usually a requirement of an opt-in where a prospect agrees to be added to your mailing list. Such a thing is not required in transactional emails.
4. If the potential customer does not want to receive your emails then as a professional email marketer it is your job to provide an opt-out link. This is not an issue with transactional emails because the recipients of those mails are expecting your email.
Bulk emailing or more professionally called as email marketing has developed into its own sub-industry over the years. Given the dividends it has given to professional marketers and other professionals, it has completely transformed the advertising and promotional industry. Usually, you can use a software tool that takes care of all your bulk emailing needs but there are some things which you need to take care of even while using an automated tool for sending your emails
If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing. This is why you need to have a clear strategy in mind before you start sending bulk emails. A good set of questions can be, what do I exactly want to achieve through bulk emailing? Who is my target audience? What is the best way to reach out to them? You can define your strategy into categories like driving sales, increasing brand awareness, nurturing leads, customer engagement, etc.
2. Segmenting mailing lists
Same set of emails do not work for everyone in the list and so it is a good practice to segment your mailing list based on location, interests, industry, stage they occupy in your sales funnel, etc. so that not only your are able to think of segmented campaigns but also are able to send personalized mails to each segment.
Emails with personalized subject lines have a 50% higher open rate. So we suggest that you give a lot of energy into personalizing your marketing campaigns. This is not so difficult as it may seem as you will read further up in this post, many email marketing tools allow you to personalize your campaigns based on different fields in your mailing list. But, we have to proceed with caution here because since this is not a cold email, subtlety is appreciated.
Nobody likes to feel that they are just one of the many to receive a particular message. The more exclusive you make your customer feel, the more success you would get out of your campaign. So, it is a good practice to not use “do-not-reply” emails for your campaigns and to instead use kind of emails where users can actually reply to you. Some email marketing tools also provide a “reply-to” email address for this purpose.
5. Adjust your emails for mobile
Optimization for mobile devices is the key to high open rates in today’s industry. Most of the users are accessing emails through their phones and if you are running a B2C business then this becomes even more important for you. You should keep your subject line short and if you use a lot of extravagant plugins to make your email look attractive it is a good rule of thumb to first check how it looks on a mobile device because ultimately a major portion of the readers would be reading your email on a mobile device.
This is also sometimes termed as regression testing because in a way we are keeping all elements constant and changing just one element at a time to see what works better. It is important first to consult your marketing professional before carrying out such tests and we do not recommend doing this on your own if you are entering this field for the first time.
Mailing list developed over time. The world of the internet is volatile, people don’t stay active at one place for long. The movement of users between communication platforms over the world wide web is always something which we need to keep a track of. Similarly, emails also tend to die out over time. Some of them become inactive because the users stopped using them, or they moved on to some other email address. If such stale ids are in your list then your campaigns’ delivery rate will be affected, effectively impacting the IP reputation of your server. So, keep cleaning your list of these emails for sustaining efficient campaign results.
Email marketing gives you the liberty to design your emails as HTML templates so you can really go crazy with images and design. But be cautious, as we've stated many times before in this piece, subtlety is the key. So, use images to convey information better than words but make sure not to go over the top.
You should make sure that your email is easy to read and understand at one simple glance. Use shorter sentences and paragraphs and use simple terms which are understandable by normal public who are out of the industry. Using bullet points is also another important aspect which goes in towards making the language of your emails concise. If people spend less time trying to understand your email, they will spend more time engaging with your content.
Everyone loves stories, this is a tactic which has withstood the test of time. From the ancient ages to the current internet age, the impact that stories have on the human mind is unquestionable. These stories can be the backstory of how your company formed, or a testimonial from one of your happy clients.
Now one may think that what difference does it really make if I send emails on a Sunday or a Monday. The truth is that people miss emails as well and if you don’t want your emails to be missed then it is best to send emails in the middle of the week during daytime. That being said, we should understand that there is no ideal time for sending emails but based on population trends we can make some estimates on the suggested timings.
This is one of those things that add legitimacy to your brand. People are looking for companies they can trust and if you add an email signature by a real person at the end of the email, then it goes on to helping your potential customers to be able to trust you better.
Even though you are sending your emails to only people who have opted-in to your mailing list, it is a good practice to add a subscribe button. What this will do is when your subscribers forward your emails to their family and friends then the new recipients would also be able to subscribe to your mailing list.
Being consistent here does not mean sending emails everyday, here consistency means that the design of your email templates should be consistent in itself and also should reflect the brand identity. Imagine if Apple started launching different looking macbooks every single year. They would lose their traditional identity that Apple has created for themselves and this is why consistency is so much more important.
You should add all of your organization’s social media links to the end of your email. This will make sure that even if they don’t buy your product immediately, they stay connected in your sales funnel.
Top tools for Email marketing in 2022
More than half of all the emails are now read on mobile devices, so if your email isn’t optimized to load in a mobile platform, users may start marking your email as spam and after a while the filters take this as the input and put all the emails with similar loading issues in the spam folders.
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