What is the best way to use Bulk Send safely and effectively?

Our bulk send feature gives you a powerful new way to conduct outreach. In cases where you need to follow up to large groups of contacts, send out press releases to online publications, or push more general announcements to lists you’ve already got a relationship with, this option will make you much more efficient. However, as all good web-slingers and web-marketers know, with great power comes great responsibility.

Google has been cracking down on spam and unsolicited messages, so misuse can have serious repercussions for your business or your clients. Read on to learn how to use this feature safely and effectively.

1. Send only to carefully targeted lists

While “spray and pray” outreach isn’t super-effective to begin with, sending large volumes of messages to contacts that aren’t directly relevant to your campaign is going to increase the likelihood that you’ll be perceived as a spammer.

Instead, focus significant time and attention up-front on the prospecting side of list-building. You’ll be rewarded with better responses and you won’t trigger spam complaints.

For example, you’ll have much better results sending an email about your new HVAC product to sites interested in industrial supply, not ones that cover digital marketing…(Yes, we’ve seen this).

2. Spread out your email send times

While we don’t place limits on the number of emails you can send in bulk, it still pays to be cautious here.

Email clients can get suspicious of large volumes of email being sent at once, particularly if it regularly exceeds their daily send limits.

To avoid issues in this area, break up large campaigns into several sends. If you want to play it safe, we’d recommend limiting your bulk sends to 200 emails per day.

3. Limit your followups

Following up can be a great way to get a contact to take action on your email.

However, it can also be very annoying and lead to spam complaints if you go overboard.

Each followup to a message without a reply increases your likelihood that you’ll be flagged, which can impact deliverability for your whole list.

To avoid this, limit followups to a bare minimum and test with smaller lists before scheduling them en masse.

4. Don’t send from new email accounts (particularly if they’re free)

Google and other email providers place much more scrutiny on new email accounts than on older, trusted ones.

Therefore, activity that would be fine coming from an established account can cause Google to raise red flags and inhibit deliverability while they investigate to make sure they aren’t being gamed by a spammer.

Try to avoid sending in bulk from new email accounts altogether for best results. If that is not an option, we’d recommend using a paid email client such as AWS, Exchange, or SendGrid.

If you haven't already, feel free to check out our Bulk Send FAQ to help you address common "Need to Review" errors while using Bulk Send.