How to Send Bulk Emails without Spamming: A Step-by-step Guide

What are Bulk Emails?

Bulk emails are precisely what they sound like — emails sent in bulk. These can include email campaigns, marketing emails, and just about anything sent to a mailing list rather than to an individual user.

How do Bulk Emails Work?

First, you’ll typically prepare a mailing list from scratch through a service like BookYourData or by combining parts of old mailing lists.

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You’ll then use a commercial email platform such as Mailchimp to deliver your emails to your mailing list while preserving the privacy of your contacts. This also allows you to include exciting and interactive components to the email, such as sign-up buttons, images, and some degree of personalization.

Finally, you’ll push the send button, and your email will enter the world!

Benefits of Bulk Emailing

Bulk emailing has various benefits and disadvantages, a few of which we will expand on below.

Cost-Effective

More contacts reached with one push of the send button means fewer emails need to be written, which means you need to hire fewer employees and spend less money on paying for work hours.

Bulk emails excel at contacting a wide range of leads efficiently, and many platforms are either free or reasonably priced, allowing you to cut your marketing costs significantly.

Wide Reach

When appropriately designed, the “bulk” in the email will ensure you can reach many business prospects or other contacts. Broad reach is significant in B2B marketing, where you may only get a 10–20% response rate.

Targeted Marketing

Many platforms for bulk email sending allow you to partition your mailing lists effectively into different categories — for example, you might tag by location or department.

This allows you to select different demographics to email in each bulk send efficiently.

Additionally, many bulk email clients allow you to include personalization for specific subscribers or groups of subscribers, ensuring that you can add a personal touch to your emails. Personalizing emails with custom images and text is excellent for catching attention.

Immediate Results

Bulk emailing can produce immediate results, as it gets you directly in contact with potential customers rather than having to get through the barriers that typically crop up when you are trying to contact specific people or roles in a business.

Measurable

Email analytics allow you to track what’s happening with your mailing list comprehensively, clarifying what is and isn’t working in your email tactics and enabling you to quickly alter your techniques to maximize efficiency.

Scalable

Bulk email lists can be sent to 100, 1000, or even 10,000 contacts! While some free platforms will begin charging as your mailing list increases, the ability is there to expand as high as you need to.

Challenges with Bulk Emailing

Spam Filters

Bulk emails are much more likely to be marked as spam — so much so that Google has specific guidelines to help bulk email senders avoid this problem. Spam filters are one of the biggest obstacles to ensuring your emails hit their targets. One of the best methods to skip spam filters is using email warmup tools.

Regulations

Many countries have regulations around what you must include in emails, particularly bulk emails, to avoid being considered spam. In some countries, failing to comply with these regulations is a criminal offense and can lead to severe consequences for you or your business.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a list of requirements for bulk emails in the USA, which is vital to follow. 

Most of these are common sense: ensure that your recipients can unsubscribe, clearly mark advertising content as such, and don’t misrepresent email content. 

If you follow these, you shouldn’t run into any trouble in the USA, but other countries will have different laws and requirements that you should be aware of if you intend to operate there or send emails to their jurisdictions.

High Bounce Rates

If you have a poor mailing list, you will likely get many hard bounces where emails cannot be delivered. Even if you have a good mailing list, you’re likely to get lots of soft bounces from people who are uninterested in your content at the time of receipt.

Reputation Management

Sender reputation is one of the most important aspects of email marketing today. It can determine whether or not emails are marked as spam and whether they will make it to the right place.

Bulk emailing can significantly decrease a sender’s reputation if not done correctly, so you must be careful when designing your email list and content to avoid damaging this.

Email Design Issues

You'll get less user buy-in if your emails lack design or content. It can also be challenging to design bulk emails to maximize engagement due to the large number and diverse range of people you contact.

Why Your Emails Get Marked As Spam

Poor Email Content

If your email content is irrelevant to the recipient or the subject line, your email will likely be marked as spam. Poor email content can also look like poor structuring, spelling, or grammar.

Low Engagement Rates

Email providers may assume you are spamming if users don’t engage with your messages regularly due to the lack of interaction.

High Complaint Rates

Some recipients may mark your emails as spam if they don’t remember subscribing to your email list or if they can’t find an accessible unsubscribe link. If too many of your recipients mark your emails as spam, you’ll be sent to the spam folder.

Not Including an Unsubscribe Link

Not including an unsubscribe link is an easy way to be marked as spam by various users. Most, if not all, legitimate mailing lists and providers should require the inclusion of an unsubscribe link.

Sending to Inactive Email Addresses

If your emails go to inactive addresses, you will likely be flagged as spam. Some of these email addresses can be spam traps, places that are aimed at catching people who send spam emails and flagging them to mailing services.

Building an Email List

Identifying Your Target Audience

Step one is to make sure you know who you want to email! Without thinking about who you want your brand to reach, you won’t know what information your readers want to see in your emails.

Consider who is interested in your product, service, or email content and their interests. Break this down into likely businesses or clients interested in your content.

Growing Your List

Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to start growing your email list. Ideally, you’ll already have a few email addresses ready to seed the list with — from there; you can build on these by looking at connections on sites such as LinkedIn to find relevant professional contacts.

You can also purchase email lists from BookYourData to speed up the process. Ensure the provider you buy from is reputable to avoid being sold irrelevant emails!

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You can also use email warm-up tools to double-check that your targeted emails are active and valid addresses.

Segmenting Your Contacts

The next step is to segment your mailing list. Identify relevant categories to split up your list by — these could include location, role attached to the email address, and a variety of other relevant categories to your content.

Segmenting your contacts allows you to personalize emails and target specific users to increase engagement.

Double Opt-in Subscription Forms

When subscribing to an email list, many people only need to enter their email address in one box on the website. While this is great for ease of access, it does mean you often get a lot of low-quality email signups. These people will likely not interact with further emails you send and may even mark them as spam!

To avoid this, you can use a double opt-in subscription form. In this process, you require each user to verify that they are interested in your newsletter or services by the initial sign-up and clicking on an email confirmation link.

While this may reduce the total number of sign-ups you get, each sign-up will be of much higher quality as it demonstrates a real intention from each user to read your emails, increasing engagement and deliverability and lessening the chance of being marked as spam.

Crafting Quality Content

Creating Engaging Subject Lines

Users first see subject lines when an email hits their inbox. Ensuring you craft engaging and well-written subject lines is a crucial step in elevating engagement through quality content.

Engaging subject lines should accurately describe your email's content while enticing a user to read the email. Say you were sending an email about your latest product, the Email-a-tron 3000 — a robot that will write and send emails for you.

A good subject line for this email would include:

• The name of the product
• The fact that it is a new product
• A teaser of what kinds of things it is designed to do or achieve

For example, you might write the subject line “Email-A-Tron 3000 [New Product!] — Automate Your Mailing Processes!”

Keeping your subject lines short and grammatically correct is also essential, as otherwise, users will be less likely to click on the email.

Writing Relevant Content for Your Audience

If you have an audience of mainly working professionals, don’t spend time in your content writing appealing to the retired or student demographics, as this won’t be relevant to your recipients.

You should also adopt a style fitting to the people you are trying to contact. If you are conducting formal marketing to investment companies, you should use language suitable for the occasion.

Only fill your email full of unnecessary jargon if you need to or feel that it will enhance the impact of your content. 

You should also try to keep track of up-and-coming aspects of the environment in which your target audience exists — market trends, new research developments, and so on — and use these to maximize the relevance of your emails.

Including a Digital Signature in Emails

When creating quality content, you want to ensure two things — one, that those receiving content know that it came from you, and two, that people will find it difficult to steal and repurpose your content.

A digital signature allows you to sign your email, making it more secure and enabling your recipients to verify that it came from your email address. This way, if there are any copycats or potential scam artists who might latch onto your content, they won’t be able to.

Setting Up a Bulk Email Campaign

Choosing the Right Email Service Provider

Making sure you choose the right email service provider is a significant step in ensuring your bulk email campaign succeeds as much as possible. They are acting on your behalf, so aim to choose one that aligns with your goals.

A good email service provider uses a verified sender domain to ensure that as few spam filters as possible are tripped. Ensuring you use a reputable provider is the most important part of the process.

You should also make sure to use a provider that will fulfill your feature needs — ensuring that you have a plan that allows you to send emails to your entire list, segment effectively, and so on, which will massively increase efficiency.

Understanding Technical Issues

Knowing what to do when things go wrong is vital to minimizing user inconvenience. Email service providers such as Mailchimp have detailed troubleshooting explanations so you know how to handle issues when they arise.

Testing Different Variations of Your Message

Having a key message in mind is important for any bulk emails you send, but sometimes, that message won’t resonate with all your users. 

If you want to see what content recipients respond to best, you can send variations of your message to sample groups.

How to Send Bulk Emails Without Spamming

Step 1: Build a Strong Email List

Ensure that you have a strong email list that links to real people rather than unused or deactivated mailboxes by using a highly-ranked service like Bookyourdata.

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You want to email people with a high engagement rate with your content — using a sign-up form will likely give you the best interaction rate, but buying email addresses from a reputable provider is the next best option.

Step 2: Tidy Up Your List

Work through your email list and ensure no typos, invalid domains, or other issues with the addresses. Duplicate email addresses should also be avoided.

This way, you are maximizing the amount of potential interaction while simultaneously minimizing the number of addresses you are sending to, which should reduce the risk of being labeled as spam.

Step 3: Use a Reputable Tool

Using a reputable email tool is a great way to ensure your emails are going to the right place. Proper email tools such as Mailchimp have strong sender reputations which allow emails sent through them to make it to the inbox more regularly.

Unvetted email tools may have weaker sender reputations or be active sanctuaries for email spammers or scammers — while they may appear tempting due to low rates or good plans, using them will likely tarnish your brand.

If you use an email list provider like Bookyourdata, you don't need to worry about invalid email addresses because real-time email verification is a built-in function.

Step 4: Open With a Strong Subject Line

As we discussed above, a strong subject line is one of the best ways to improve interaction and boost engagement, two factors that are important in avoiding being marked as spam.

Making sure that you start with a strong opener means recipients are more likely to open your email and engage rather than immediately delete it or mark it as spam.

Step 5: Write Quality Content

Writing quality content means that people won’t feel ripped off when reading your email, meaning they are less likely to mark it as spam.

Quality content is targeted at your recipients, relevant to your audience’s interests, and well-structured.

Step 6: Make It Personal

Adding personalization to your emails is a great way to ensure people don’t manually mark your email as spam.

This can look as simple as greeting people by the correct name or title in the first line of the email (something supported by a variety of mailing platforms), or as complicated as sending different emails to different segments of your list.

Step 7: Monitor Your Metrics

Monitor your engagement rates to ensure that you are getting good interaction with your emails. If you have particularly high interaction rates after a particular communication, investigate the reasons why and use them to help inform further email content.

Additionally, if you are noticing a consistent lack of interaction from particular accounts or addresses, take pre-emptive steps to remove them from your mailing list in case they have become deactivated, as well as to raise your engagement rates.

Step 8: Test and Modify Your Strategy

Iterative testing of your marketing strategy is one of the biggest things you can do to promote B2B email success. Don’t stay static — try new things regularly to boost engagement and conversion rate.

Use the metrics you are monitoring to determine the effect of new strategies and combine this information to give you a better picture of what does and doesn’t work for your target audience.

Step 9: Include an Unsubscribe Link

Including an unsubscribe link means that users who are not interested in your emails can leave the mailing list easily. This means they are much less likely to mark them as spam, preserving your reputation manually.

Technical Aspects to Keep in Mind

Email Authentication

Email authentication is a process whereby emails are checked to be actually from the displayed sender. This is important in avoiding phishing scams, hacked emails, and so on.

Making sure that your email authentication is done properly will reduce the chance of your emails ending up flagged as spam.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

A sender policy framework is one method of email authentication, where an entry is created noting which domains are authorized to send email from a particular domain. 

SPF records are very important in email as without a properly formatted one, email providers may flag your emails as spam or block them altogether, fearing malicious actors using your domain.

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)

DKIM is a method used to authenticate the content of an email, not just that it was sent from a legitimate user. 

By using DKIM, you protect yourself from fraudulent email tampering and show email providers that you are a more trustworthy sender!

Between DKIM and SPF, you have a strong email authentication practice that will elevate your sender reputation and security.

IP Reputation

While you may have created a new business or email, if you are operating from an IP that was previously used for spam, malicious content, or even by a well-meaning company that fell on the wrong side of bulk email marketing, you’re at risk of having your messages flagged as spam.

Ensuring that your IP reputation stays high (by protecting against cyberattacks, checking that a malicious actor, etc. have not previously used any IP address you are using) is a key step to making sure that you avoid any spam filters.

FAQs to Send Bulk Emails without Spamming

What is Mass Mailing?

Mass mailing is the process of sending the same email (or minor variations) to many people, typically by using a mailing list.

How Many Emails Can You Send Before It’s Considered Spam?

While sending lots of emails is likely to get you classed as spam, it is not the only factor of spam classification — your content, sender reputation, and other email factors are arguably more important. 

While the exact number you can send depends on your email platform or provider, keeping it below 100 per month is a safe bet to avoid platform spam-detection measures.

How to Send Mass Emails Without Showing Addresses?

When using a reputable bulk mailing provider (the most popular being Mailchimp) you’ll have this feature automatically. 

If you are doing things a bit more personally, such as via Gmail, using the “bcc” feature on an email will blindly copy recipients so that they can only see that it was sent to them, not to anyone else.

What You Need to Remember About Sending Bulk Emails Without Spamming

There are many things to keep in mind when you design and build a mailing list for bulk email, as well as when you begin sending emails. In short, a successful bulk email sender…

• Complies with email marketing regulations
• Segments the email list for targeted messages
• Personalizes the email content for each recipient, avoids using spam trigger words in the content, and engages subscribers with relevant and valuable content.
• Monitors email deliverability rates, analyzes feedback, and adjusts strategies accordingly.
• Provides an easy-to-find unsubscribe link, maintains a clean email list by removing bounced addresses and inactive subscribers, and respects the opt-out requests promptly.
  
  

Good luck with your campaign! We hope these tips have helped you.

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