Sign up

Bulk Email Marketing: Key Features that You Cannot Perform Without

Bulk Email Marketing: Key Features that You Cannot Perform Without

Email has always been one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses of all kinds and scale. Why? Because,

With the advancement of technology, email marketing has become way more diversified in its operation and features. However, bulk email marketing, despite being an old strategy, is still effective if applied carefully.

Bulk email marketing can help you save a lot of time and work, especially if you’re wanting to expand your business or reach. When you use the correct features of a bulk email marketing solution, this work becomes even easier and more streamlined.

Bulk email marketing entails more than simply sending big volumes of emails to a wide target demographic. It allows you to handle a wide group of contacts with similar problems or requirements on your own. These contacts have one thing in common: they’ve discovered and are familiar with your business and its products or services. You can design the bulk emails to have a universal appeal and send it to the full contact list if you have the necessary bulk emailing features. Furthermore, you may analyze the level of audience involvement to a greater extent.

Bulk emailing is essential for reaching huge audiences with newsletters, promotional emails, and simply engaging with your email contact list in general. However, you don’t want to just send emails without knowing what goes into those great bulk email campaigns.

Is Bulk Emailing Useful and Worth the Attention?

We’ve heard varying views on the effectiveness of bulk email marketing in recent years.

Many marketers consider it to be an outdated strategy, preferring instead to use social media to raise brand exposure and client base. Is that the case, though?

Is bulk email marketing becoming obsolete? Absolutely NO.

Typically, mass emails are sent to an unfiltered contact list who may or may not be interested in what you have to offer. Customers today expect personalized emails with information and unique offers tailored to their specific needs. As a result, marketers are turning to email automation and personalization to send bulk emails and fulfill their marketing objectives.

According to a McKinsey study, emails are 40 times more effective than social media at acquiring new clients.

In the last decade, especially after the pandemic, bulk email marketing has come a long way. Previously, opening and viewing emails required a desktop, but today we have mobiles that readily provide people access to emails.

  • 1.7 billion individuals use their mobile phones to send emails. With so many people using their phones to check their email, it’s no surprise that the amount of emails opened on mobile devices currently accounts for 60% of all email engagement.
  • For 85% of users, smartphones have become the primary device for checking email. That rate is much greater for individuals aged 25-34, at 90%.

Therefore, the impact that bulk email marketing campaigns can have on your business is immense. It easily reaches a broad segment of audience, irrespective of where they are, what they do or which device they use to access their emails.

Machine learning and automation are used in today’s bulk email marketing services to provide personalized information at scale. People are tired of hearing the same old emails, thus personalization and relevancy are now the top priorities. A marketing campaign’s visual diversity and accessibility is also crucial to its success.

You can still send bulk emails to your list, but dynamic content tools allow you to substitute specific portions of a bulk email with content that varies depending on the recipient.

Better and Actionable Insights

With bulk email, you can gain a better understanding of what is going on without having to go back and quantify everything. You can easily scan and scrutinize the receptivity of a vast audience group towards your email campaigns. Automatically track how many people received your email, how many opened it, how many read it, what call-to-action buttons or links they clicked, how long they spent looking at it, and much more.

All of this information allows you to spot trends among your clients and devise a strategy to ensure that your mass email campaigns become more effective over time.

How to Send Bulk Emails without Spamming?

The main reason why marketers sometimes dread bulk emailing is that there are high chances of them getting flagged as spam. However, if you know what are the main reasons behind it and take some mindful action while creating and sending bulk emails, you can easily achieve high email deliverability rates.

Reasons why bulk emails may land up in the spam folder

1. No permission from the email recipient to send email

Getting permission from the recipient is the best approach to ensure that your bulk emails do not end up eventually in the spam folder. This indicates that you respect the recipient’s privacy and ensures that you are only sending emails to people who have expressed an interest in hearing from you. Emailing people without authorization is against all major email marketing platforms’ acceptable usage policies. As a result, you may be banned from these platforms as well.

Sending emails to contacts on a cold-purchased list is also a bad idea, as these contacts are more likely to classify your email as spam. Internet service providers keep watch when a large number of recipients label your emails as spam. This, in turn, tarnishes your email deliverability and increases the chances of you getting blacklisted.

2. Subscribers no longer remember you or your business

Internet service providers (ISPs) follow a simple rule for marking your emails as spam: if the email recipients mark your email as spam, ISPs will also mark them as spam over time. Any next email you send will go straight to the spam folder once the spam complaints reach a particular threshold.

The question now is why would someone who has given you permission to send them emails mark it as spam?

The reason is straightforward: they have forgotten who you are and are unaware of your business. They have no recollection of signing up for your newsletters. Perhaps you’ve given up on email marketing and are now attempting to revive it. However, those who joined the email list a year ago are likely to have forgotten about you, leading them to believe your email is spam.

To avoid this, make sure your branding is clearly evident in the email. The name of your company should be visible so that the receiver knows who sent the email. Your “from” address should be a name they are familiar with.

Send reactivation bulk email series to subscribers if you haven’t sent an email in a long period. Do not hesitate to explain about your business and brand once again through these emails and why you were missing from action for a long time. Indeed, also convey them that you will be around now and about your future email schedule. 

Subscribers may complain about your emails if you do not refresh their memory and resume sending emails as usual. Also, it’s a good practice to consider asking the subscribers whether they wish to continue receiving emails from you.

3. Poor engagement rates

When it comes to spam filtering, ISPs consider email engagement rates as the basis to make this decision. You risk being reported as spam if your email open rates are low or if the majority of your emails are deleted.

The ideal way to boost the chances of landing your emails in the inbox is to improve the email engagement rates.

  • Craft amazing and click-worthy email subject lines.
  • Work out the optimal email delivery time and frequency in tune with your target audience’s behavior and receptivity.
  • Tactfully implement email personalisation.
  • Create segments of your contact list and send relevant emails.

4. High complain and bounce rates

A high bounce rate (more than 4%), on the other hand, usually indicates that the email list is old, of poor quality, or bought from random web sources. ISPs treat such senders badly, and their reputation suffers as a result.

The majority of email services allow users to flag emails as spam. If there are too many complaints reported, the email may be filtered away. Your complaint rate should ideally be less than 0.1 percent, or one out of every thousand recipients. This number is automatically recorded and displayed by most email marketing services for all senders in the same domain.

5. Unclear ‘From’ address

When the ‘from’, ‘to’, or ‘reply-to’ information is imprecise or deceptive, this is also regarded as a serious act of email spamming. Keep in mind that such behavior will automatically filter your email and mark it as spam.

To avoid all of these situations, include your or your company’s name in the ‘reply from’ section of the email, so that your subscribers may readily remember it for future communications. It would be easier for your subscribers to recall if you use the same name for all email campaigns. You can use either your complete name or the name of your business, or a mix of both.

Strategies to Send Bulk Emails without Spamming

  • Regularly clean your email list to delete obsolete, stale and inactive contacts.
  • Maintain a balanced image to text ratio in the emails. Avoid sending emails which contain only images.
  • Do not create any deceptive or faulty email subject lines.
  • Follow the best HTML practices in the emails.
  • Include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in the emails.
  • Optimize the email content to improve its accessibility and readability across different screen sizes.
  • Organically build your email list.
  • Conduct rigorous spam tests before sending bulk email campaigns.

Best Bulk Email Marketing Practices

Determine who your target audience is.

Marketers should identify which demographic groups are most interested in the products and services that their business provides. Before establishing a bulk email campaign, consider factors such as location, interests, age groups, gender, culture, and other demographic traits. The goal is to personalize marketing emails for each category of the target market.

Concentrate on the benefits.

Clearly state in your bulk email campaigns what your subscribers will gain from using the products and services offered by your business or from the emails they are going to receive from now onwards. You can easily drive the customers to respond by highlighting their interests in the bulk email campaigns and how your business offerings resonate with their interests and choices.

Keep the emails short, crisp and free of bluff.

A marketing email should be brief. This way, the email recipient will be able to notice the important information quickly enough to make a decision. When reading long or intricate emails, most individuals lose the plot. Worse, such emails might be deleted immediately after being opened. As a result, marketers should create succinct emails and deliver information that focuses on a certain brand’s product offerings as well as on the recipients’ problems and needs.

Offer exclusive discounts and deals.

Marketers could tempt email recipients by offering them special offers that are only accessible to them.

Clearly make the deadlines known to the audience.

Mention the offer’s expiration date to emphasize the need for a quick response. Customers will be deterred from procrastinating, which can lead to forgetfulness, as a result of this.

Provide enough lines of communication.

Allow customers to respond to your emails. For example, a marketer can provide a phone number, a URL, or other information that allows a potential consumer to easily contact the email sender with any questions.

Features of a Good Bulk Emailing Tool

Testing and Optimization Supporting Functionalities

Competent bulk email systems should have enough tools and resources to allow optimization and testing of the emails and its components at intricate level. If you don’t test your email campaigns comprehensively, you’ll be missing out on a lot of useful information.

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a terrific approach to figure out what kind of email your audience will resonate with. This functionality is a must in bulk email marketing software, if you’re having trouble getting high open rates and converting subscribers. You can figure out what works best by experimenting with different subject lines and components inside the body of your email.

Email optimization helps in improving email deliverability, engagement, and conversion.

From A/B testing subject lines and content to developing multi-step bulk email sequences that convert readers into leads and leads into long-term clients, there are many methods to approach email optimization. Here are a few instances of how optimizing the emails and infrastructure might increase lead generation and engagement:

Extensive Tracking Capabilities

Comprehensive and large-scale data reporting is another important feature of an effective bulk mailing system. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized your bulk email campaigns are if you can’t see the results of your efforts, let alone determine whether email is assisting you in meeting your objectives.

The ability to gain insight into precise and accurate statistics will assist you in becoming more familiar with the actions taken by your recipients, allowing you to learn more about their preferences. 

Statistics and analytics of the bulk email marketing campaigns should provide you with as much data as possible, including not only the number of e-mail messages opened, but also the most popular domains among your receivers or in your geographic location. Equally important is that the statistics are updated on a frequent basis – without the need to wait for them. So, be certain to pick a bulk emailing software that can accurately offer critical data, and a stunning, real-time dashboard is an added bonus.

Some of the key metrics that you must be able to track with your bulk and targeted email marketing services are:

  • Email open rates: Depending on the business niche, industry and campaign objectives, a healthy email open rate should be between 17% and 28%.
  • Bounce rates: Acceptable range of bounce rate is approximately 3% to 5%, but this varies from business to business.
  • Clickthrough rates: A good clickthrough rate will be in the range of 2 to 5%.
  • Unsubscribe rates: Ideally, the unsubscribe rates should be below 0.5%.
  • Spam complaint rates: Below 0.1% of spam complaints can be considered as acceptable.
  • Unique opens
  • Click to open rates
  • Conversion rates

The data and statistics in the campaign performance reports will allow you to compare and analyze your campaigns, trace the pitfalls, as well as help in making decisions on modifying the campaigns where necessary. When comparing campaigns, keep in mind that you should compare them across the largest time periods available. The effectiveness of your actions will be measured in a broader and more reliable method this way.

Be mindful about which variables and key metrics you’re tracking to evaluate the efficacy of bulk email campaigns. Additionally, make sure you can track email effectiveness, the quality of your email list, and your growth toward your overall objectives. You’re on the right route for more profitable email marketing if you can figure out each of those.

Segmentation

Look for a bulk email provider that lets you segment your subscriber list based on a variety of criterias. Proper list segmentation ensures that the right message reaches the right group of audience. It improves the overall success rates of the campaigns, as segmentation in the bulk email list management efforts receive 14.37% more openings and 64.78% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns, according to several  data. When implementing list segmentation, keep in mind the following practices:

  • Define segmentation goals: What are your objectives for bulk email marketing? What role does segmentation play in achieving such objectives?
  • Keep updating the segments time-to-time: Customers’ requirements, interests, and preferences change and evolve throughout time. Accordingly, you should also categorize and recategorize the email list segments as their demands alter.
  • Monitor the effectiveness of segmentation: Most importantly, evaluate segmentation outcomes against the set targets. Remember that what is measured improves.

Personalisation

Effective list segmentation helps to identify the individual ‘characteristics’ of different segments of your contact lists. Further, this allows the creation of personalized and contextual bulk email campaigns. If we talk about the statistics of sending tailored contextual emails, they have a 50% average open rate, while newsletters have a 22% average open rate.

People want to be treated as individuals, thus personalization is critical in bulk email marketing. Personalizing mass email campaigns isn’t as difficult as it may appear, and it doesn’t necessitate personally responding to each and every one. Personalizing bulk email campaigns is as simple as employing email list segmentation and customization tags, thanks to automation tools. Automation takes away all the manual labor. Personalization provides dynamic email content that is entirely dependent on real-time data gathered from the recipients’ online activities. Simply said, all you have to do now is just launch the email campaign. Plus the benefits that you reap are immense:

  • Personalized emails will generate six times more sales than generic email campaigns.
  • Personalization of bulk email campaigns lead to a reduction in the unsubscribe rates.
  • Pick from different personalization scenarios that best suit your marketing and business objectives. These can include win-back, growth, customer retention, and product upgrade email campaigns.
  • Personalized emails can have conversion rates that are four times higher than the average.
  • Targeted personalisation, according to 74% of marketers, boosts customer engagement.

Another advantage of utilizing bulk email personalisation is that it helps you to capitalize the momentum. You may customize your emails according to the target audience using the best bulk email software. Simply put, it enables you to deliver exactly what your subscribers are seeking. Bulk email marketing allows you to communicate with your customers in a personal way by giving you significant and dynamic possibilities to interact with them.

It also allows you to send real-time messaging to your most loyal customers, such as daily, special, or affordable offers. These bulk emails keep your business at the top of your audience’s mind.

Drag and Drop Email Builder

Drag and drop email builders make the process of creating engaging and on-brand emails easy. You can drag a component from the sidebar, such as an image, quotation, or button, to a part in your email using this simple function. This can help you save time as you figure out the ideal email flow for bulk emailing and move things around.

  • Quick and easy to use: These tools provide access to a library of pre-made templates and designs that you can adapt to your needs by adding or removing image blocks, buttons, text, and colors.
  • Online tool: There is no need to install any software because the email builder tool stores your sessions automatically and allows you to return to your templates at any moment to re-use or alter them.
  • Completely customizable: You can modify pre-made pieces of the email templates by changing the code or settings to suit your preferences.
  • Exports are compatible and seamless: A solid email builder tool should never be considered a standalone solution; instead, it should simply integrate into your existing marketing toolkit.
  • Supports various file formats: Engaging content like GIFs and videos have a better chance of capturing recipients’ attention than text and photographs.

High Email Deliverability Rates

Imagine spending a lot of time and effort on an email campaign that never reaches the inboxes of your readers. Isn’t it terrible?

That’s why it’s critical to double-check your bulk email service provider’s delivery rates to ensure that your emails reach all of the contacts in your email list. To accomplish this, it must perform numerous technological tasks on the backend. The delivery rate of a decent bulk email software should be higher than 90%.

Automation

Powerful email automation tools will drop your business brand in front of the right people at the most opportune time and at the most effective touchpoint. Most importantly, this will all be done automatically without the need of any interference or supervision.

An automated mass mailing system is an ideal choice if you are looking for avenues to scale. Such features will create automatic workflows for the processes that are repetitive and cyclical. Plus, they enhance the overall email experience for the contacts.

Bulk Email List – Everything you Need to Know

What is a bulk email list?

A bulk email list is a compilation of all the recipients’ email addresses from a company’s database. Bulk email lists often include all of your subscribers from multiple channels, signup forms, lead magnets, and other sources. Bulk email lists are used to deliver an email campaign or message to practically every subscriber on your mailing list.

Types of Bulk Email List

Regular bulk email lists

A regular bulk email list is a collection of email addresses that hasn’t been refined in any manner. When an email marketer uses this list, they send an email to the full email list with the same email and offers. This method is no longer considered best practices in email marketing because it raises the likelihood of a message being ignored, deleted, or even classed as spam.

Targeted bulk email lists

A tailored email list is one that focuses on each existing and potential customer’s individual needs, likes, and dislikes. Marketers can construct more personalized and individualized marketing campaigns with this type of bulk email list. It allows businesses to communicate with people who need their products or services as well as those who have similar interests.

A business will always have loyal clients if it develops a targeted list. A marketer can also focus on creating strong and long-lasting relationships with clients with a focused bulk email list. When communicating with different types of consumers and prospects, multiple communication styles might be used. A marketer can provide them information in a way that they like.

Bulk Email List Management: Best Strategies

One of the most important aspects of bulk email marketing is effective email list management. Keeping everything organized in your bulk email list will increase your chances of getting greater results from bulk email marketing campaigns. Your approach and strategy to productively manage bulk email list must encapsulate the following ideas:

  • Creating a list of high-quality contacts
  • Tracking and closely following leads through the sales funnel
  • Maintaining a clean list with correct data
  • Ensuring that the emails reach the intended destination.

Here is a list of some best practices for bulk email list management:

List Segmentation

Every email marketer knows the importance of list segmentation to derive the most out of bulk email campaigns. Your ROI will be higher if you categorize your audience properly.

Filters are used in segmentation to make it easier to locate a group of subscribers who have anything in common. Depending on your marketing goal, contact filtering might be based on a variety of parameters. There’s no need to manually make separate email lists for each parameter. You may quickly construct segments with an advanced email marketing tool, allowing you to target contacts depending on their segment’s attributes.

You can figure out how many email list segments you’ll need to create based on your goals, industry, and business style. That is why, before you begin your email marketing journey, you must first identify your goals.

Engagement-based Email List Filtration

Another tactic to manage bulk email lists is to create email lists based on the level of interaction with the email campaigns. You can, for example, filter your email database to see who opens your emails, who clicks links, and who are your most devoted subscribers.

Email list filtering on the basis of engagement allows you to create customized email campaigns depending on your subscribers’ responses to prior campaigns. This also helps to easily separate out dis-engaged contacts.

Sending emails to disengaged contacts repeatedly results in low open and click-through rates. It may harm your sender reputation in the long run.

Filtering away unengaged subscribers allows you to focus your email marketing efforts on those who are truly interested, rather than succumbing in spam.

Set up a workflow in your bulk email marketing software to filter out anyone who hasn’t opened or engaged with a given number of campaigns inside a certain timeframe. Watch this list and remove the contacts as needed.

Contact Tags

Contact tags allow you to give your segments an extra depth of detail.

If each contact in your email list is different, then why send all of them the same email? Contact tagging will help you easily find a way out of this problem.

You can define significant attributes using segments. This is exactly what defines and influences your complete marketing information. To offer an extra degree of personalization, contact tags are used to create variety within those segments. It usually revolves around a single event or campaign, such as ‘participated in a webinar’ or ‘downloaded a whitepaper.’

Alternatively, you can construct a ‘super-subscriber’ list of your most active subscribers. This list can be used to gauge the reaction when you’re taking a chance with your email marketing, such as when announcing a new product or a re-brand. You can also take advantage of their responsiveness by contacting them when you require feedback or a response.

How to Build a Result-yielding Bulk Email List?

  • Implement double opt-in to make sure that readers are willing to receive marketing emails and that the list does not contain any erroneous addresses.
  • Find unique ways to persuade readers to sign up for your newsletter. Make a compelling lead magnet.
  • Allow subscribers to choose their preferred content and email delivery frequency.
  • Create customized email content and information for various email list segments.
  • Reactivate dormant subscribers. Don’t dismiss folks that appear uninterested in your business. Find out the reasons and be prepared to provide highly relevant information.

Send Bulk Emails for Free: Know How?

There are many email marketing softwares that offer free bulk emailing services. Gmail and Outlook aren’t suited for mass email marketing. A dedicated email marketing platform like Mailercloud is required when sending bulk email campaigns or big volumes of promotional emails. These specialized email service providers handle all bulk email sending demands and provide the best possible deliverability to ensure that your emails get into the inbox.

When it comes to selecting the best bulk email marketing software for your needs, there are various factors to consider. To begin with, and especially if you’re new to email marketing, you’ll need software that is simple to use. You should look for software that has a large number of assets that allows you to customize your emails and mark potential customers according to their needs. Because you must know the email open rates and click rate to better plan your future email campaigns, the email marketing tool must provide excellent analytic and metric reports.

The best bulk email marketing software should provide you with a diverse variety of tools to assist you in creating a successful and impactful email marketing campaign. The greatest software will provide you with certain intuitions into your clients’ activity to assist you in making the best marketing judgments. This information should be easy to acquire without wasting time or causing confusion about how to create reports. The best bulk email services are ones that provide you with immediate reports so you can see what’s working and what’s not in your email marketing campaign.

To handle your bulk email campaigns, you’ll need to experiment with different scenarios to see which titles or images have the biggest impact on your customers. You’ll be able to arrange your business events, automatic sender, and engage with the majority of clients without interruption thanks to the automation feature.

Finally, the best bulk email services should include auto segmentation features that allow you to access your affiliate’s list based on statistics, needs, or previous purchases. Because your customer will not open an email that they are not interested in, segmentation is essential for effective email marketing.

All in all, the best free bulk email marketing services will have capabilities that make creating, sending, and delivering bulk emails as simple as possible. They will have tools like:

  • Prebuilt, mobile-responsive email templates ensure that your emails will look great in any email inbox.
  • Email builder with drag-and-drop functionality for quick and elegant email blasts.
  • Spam and email design check tools to observe how emails appear in the inbox.
  • Email delivery time optimization to reach the right contacts at the ideal time.
  • List segmentation and filtration features to maintain email list hygiene.
  • Actionable insights into the campaign performance.

Become Smarter to Better Your Bulk Emailing Approach

The world of email marketing and bulk emailing is changing faster than we can keep up with. Over the last few years, the bulk email marketing strategy has seen some innovative applications. Automation and Artificial Intelligence are changing the whole face of mass emailing.

A quick recap:

Clearly identify the goals that you want to achieve with bulk email marketing.

  • You may want to run bulk email campaigns to reactivate inactive subscribers, promote new products in a new market, new product or service announcements or for any other purpose.
  • Having a clear picture of what you want to achieve with mass email campaigns will help you to look for suitable features while shopping for the email marketing software.

Aligning with your goals, choose the best bulk email marketing software with the most advanced features.

  • Bulk email list management features
  • Workflow and email automation
  • Detailed metrics, user behavior, and analytics reports
  • Intuitive email builder tools
  • IP warming up features and functionalities
  • Email design templates

Follow the best practices pertaining to bulk emailing.

  • Send emails only to those who have opted-in or subscribed.
  • Maintain good anti-spam hygiene.
  • Create an IP warm-up routine to regularly warm up your IP.
  • Bulk emails should only be sent to a clean email list.
  • The email must be contextual and to the purpose.
  • Create responsive and mobile-optimized emails.
  • Always, always include an opt-out link in the emails.
  • Consider the technical factors to improve email deliverability. These includes Sender Policy Framework, DomainKeys Identified Mail, DMARC.
  • Stringently adhere to anti-spam norms. 

Measure, analyze and tweak your strategies.

  • A/B test the emails before sending them.
  • Keep an eye on the current email marketing trends to refine the campaigns accordingly and gain a competitive edge.
Hemanti Pradhan

Hemanti Pradhan

I am Hemanti Pradhan, a Content Writer skilled in delivering technical as well as non-technical writeups. My portfolio covers a wide spectrum – from product documentation to lifestyle blogs & social media posts. When not writing, I indulge myself in drawing Zentagles & Mandala art.

Related Articles