If you’re an active Gmail user, you’d probably already know how popular bulk emails and e-newsletters are nowadays. In the age of technology, this is the best way for businesses to reach potential customers across the world or even keep regular customers informed with ongoing business activities.
Even though your clogged inbox might often be a bother, businesses tend to underutilize the effective marketing tool that is bulk emailing. With a successful emailing campaign, developed with an effective strategy and well-designed templates, businesses can ultimately grow their customer base.
Let’s say you’re locked and loaded, with a killer emailing campaign that is estimated to reel in customers by the hundreds. But, how do you disperse it to all your prospects at once? Manual inputting definitely isn’t an option.
This is where bulk emailing services jump in to save the day!
According to the Google community, there is no official way of sending bulk emails from Gmail. But, thanks to the internet, there are many alternate solutions you can opt for, which offer a basic bulk emailing service that will help you in marketing your brand.
One such service provider is MailChimp, which became popular soon after its launch. Such platforms aim to make mailing easier and visually interactive through various tools. They promise ease of use through its UX design, which also helps in curating personalized, aesthetically appealing branded emails to catch the client’s eye.
While services like MailChimp score significantly in appeal and customizability, it is to be noted that these services use their own email provider without connecting to your Gmail and are mainly used as an INBOUND email marketing tool.
Additionally, there are some basics that one needs to be aware of when opting for email marketing and the use of bulk email sending services:
- Due to peoples’ privacy settings, many marketing emails using third party email providers may end up in the promotions tab or even spam folder.
The only way to deal with such problems is to establish a subscriber or newsletter sign-up integrated on the brand’s web-page in order to streamline the process of customers accepting emails from your organization as promotional material- which can be quite a hassle. This is also why people use MailChimp or SendGrid as an inbound email marketing tool, which means that you only send mass emails to users who have already given you permissions to send them marketing emails or newsletters.
Many people wrongly choose those email providers as their cold email outreach tool. This rarely works because those prospects are not opted in to receive your emails, and as a result the outreach emails will most likely go to the promotions tab or spam folder.
Read more here about why you should not use MailChimp as an outreach tool.
2. When you send those emails through MailChimp, you will not have a copy in your own inbox.
Even seemingly you can specify a “Sent from” email through MailChimp, the emails are actually sent through their email provider so your inbox won’t see a copy. Again, this does not matter if you only send newsletters to your subscribers because you do not expect to communicate with your subscriber. Luckily you can still specify the “Reply to” email, so in rare cases your subscribers respond to your marketing email, you can still receive it.
Now you have collected a list of prospects, and you want to start cold emailing them. Maybe you want to book a call with them , show them a demo, or just ask for a guest post. In all these cases, you are expecting their replies. You are trying to do an OUTBOUND email campaign with a high reply rate. Apparently Mailchimp will not be an option.
Introducing SocialMailer, an email outreach tool that allows you to send mass emails through your own Gmail. It is actually not a new tool, it has been battle tested with millions of outreach emails sent in the past 5 years by the SocialBook team and our open rate goes as high as 90%.
SocialMailer
Below is a step by step guide on how to send mass emails through your own Gmail.
Step 1- Connecting your Gmail/G Suite (or Outlook):
The landing page gives you the option of creating your first email campaign. By clicking on it, the user is allowed to set up their email address, organize their emails and curate their templates.
By clicking on “Create Email Campaign”, you will be redirected to the 4 step process of setting up your primary email account (Google or Outlook) and organizing the text and template of your email.
By clicking on “Connect a new email account”, you will be redirected to add an existing Google account or an Outlook account.
When clicking on Gmail/G Suite, you will be asked for some permission:
Please note that SocialBook is an authorized vendor of Google to build apps on top of Gmail API. We actually have to go through several months security compliance process to get approval to integrate with Gmail. You are in good hands.
Alternatively, you can also connect emails separately by going into the email account setup page, which also gives you options to specify sender name and add a customized signature.
Step 2, Prepare your contacts
On this tab, you can specify who you want to send emails to. You have the option to either upload your contacts’ CSV file, or manually add them into a recipient list.
Please note that the columns in the CSV file also support your own customized fields. For example, if you are doing guest post outreach, your CSV file can contain name, email, link, where link can be a reference to a blog you are referring to. Those columns will be shown in the next page as mail merge options and can be automatically replaced with actual values when emails are sent out.
Once you add all your recipients, you can also check your email addresses first to make sure they are all good and valid emails. Bad emails will be removed automatically from the list.
Step 3- Draft your email content:
This is the most essential step to gain a high open/reply rate for your email campaign. You can read this article about how to write cold emails. We just list out some really important gists here:
- Your email title is the key. Almost 40% of people decide to read your emails by just reading your email title.
- Your first email should be concise and to the point. People are busy. If they cannot finish reading your email in the first 4-5 seconds they lose interest.
- Focus on what benefit you can provide to them. People have no obligation to help you. Focusing on what you can do for them
SocialMailer has lots of predefined email templates. Although it mainly focuses on contacting creators out there, you can read through those templates, and customize them to best suit your needs:
You can also save your template to use later in other campaigns, or to share with your team:
Once you’ve gone through the above steps, you can test out your email just to be safe, by sending it to yourself as a test email. This will help observing the frames, size, font, and appearance of your email before shooting out a wide-spread email campaign.
Remember we talked about adding self defined mail merge options in step 2? They will be shown here under Insert:
By the way, have you noticed the “Enable Follow-up” radio button there? That is an advanced feature that allows you to write dripping emails. For example, you can specify to send another follow up email if the recipient has not replied to your email in five days:
Step4. Schedule your email.
The final step is to schedule your email and overview the summary of your email campaign.
Click Start your campaign, you can now sit back and start seeing emails sent out gradually. Here I use the word “gradually” because we are using Gmail APIs to send emails out on your behalf and Google has its own sending paces that we have to follow.
If you think that's all SocialMailer provides, you will be surprised when you see the email dashboard for your campaign.
Since SocialMailer integrates with Gmail, it essentially is your inbox, but in a concise and conversational way.
It allows you to sort your email campaigns by “Unread”, filter them by labels (similar to Gmails’ label). When clicking into the email campaign, you will see all the progress of your email outreach:
Clicking on any of the stats number will lead to the recipients page, which is essentially your inbox of this campaign:
As you can see in the screenshot above, I contacted around 100 YouTube creators and 82 opened my email, that is a stunning 81.19% open rate. We mentioned above you will have a copy of all these emails in your inbox, however, is it almost impossible for me to keep track of my own inbox. Without SocialMailer, I would not know which creators I have been communicating with and who they are (how many followers they have, what are their channel stats etc).
When you click on the magic bubble, a side menu will popup giving you the conversation view with that specific recipient.
Tired of the hard-to-read gmail thread view with unlimited indent and “Re”? You are not alone:
With SocialMailer, you can do everything just like from your inbox. You can insert images, attach files and even cc people. You can also select preloaded templates or save your email as a content for future use.
And the best part? You can share the email campaigns with your teammate. So even if you get tired of the outreach and would like to take a nice vacation in Hawaii, your teammate can pick up where you left off!
In some cases, you do not need to see your outreach emails in campaigns, you can also go to “All Emails” section accessed through the drop down menu present on the left side of your page. There you just see all your email threads. Sometimes I use it to check all my unread emails
Last but not the least, since SocialMailer was used by the SocialBook team to reach out to creators, it also integrates the functions of sending bulk IG messages to Instagram creators. Read this blog for how to sending bulk IG messages.
But before sending your cold email out, know your brand and know your audience.
While any branding and promotional service providers can do the job of sending bulk emails for you and your organization, it only adds to efficiency to choose one that fits well with your marketing and promotional requirements. The first step to that is ensuring your customer base actually reads your email.
If you want to send mass outreach emails through Gmail/G Suite email, SocialMailer is the way to go. Anyways I got 81.19% open rate and 22.77% click rate, tell me yours!
Try it for free now