How to Send Bulk Emails
As I'm working for the company selling email marketing software, people coming to our website often ask me how to send bulk emails. I decided to cover this question in this article. I divided it into three points: 1) how to get an email list; 2) how to send bulk emails and 3) how to track emails. In my opinion, these are 3 key elements of email marketing. Now let's stop over each point to learn how to do email marketing in the right way.
How to Get a Free Email List
If you are going to buy email addresses or harvest them on the Internet, stop and think for a while. Think about what you want to achieve by sending bulk emails. Do you want to send emails blindly in the hope to get a quick short-term profit? Or do you aim at long-term perspective and hope to get profit from your list again and again?
If you are serious about email marketing and your goal is to build a long-term relationship with your list to get profit, buying or harvesting email addresses are not the way to go. I know it's the quickest way to get an email list but there are at least 2 reasons for NOT doing it:
- Those people don't know you and don't expect emails from you. They are likely to treat your emails as spam and hit 'This is spam' button in their email clients. If your emails generate many spam complaints, this hurts your sender reputation and deliverability. But the worst thing is that the ISP can shut your account down for sending spam emails.
- You can't be sure that all email addresses you buy are valid. The list is likely to contain many invalid and spam trap emails. If you hit a spam trap account, you are labelled as a spammer. Again, your sender reputation is damaged, and you come into troubles with your ISP.
With that said, the best way to get free email addresses for sending bulk emails is by using a signup form on your website or blog. People will come to your site and subscribe consciously. It is called permission in email marketing. People permit you to email them by giving you their email addresses.
If you have a blog powered by WordPress, you can use our newsletter plugin to put a signup form to your blog. Or, you can consider creating a landing page to collect subscribers. It is a standalone page where you place a signup form and give them some incentive to subscribe. You can give them a PDF report, an e-book, a free download, a discount to buy something from you in return for their email address.
Once you see people come and subscribe, you can start sending emails to them.
How to Send Bulk Emails
There many web based and desktop email sender programs out there. You only have to choose the one that meets your needs better. If you want to send bulk emails from your computer maintaining your in-house email list, desktop email marketing software is what you need. For instance, G-Lock EasyMail7 allows you create an email newsletter, send it to your list and then process bounced emails — all inside the program.
Before you send the email to the whole list, don't forget to test your email newsletter. How to send a test email? It's very simple with GlockApps.
First of all, see if the message arrived to the Inbox or the spam folder. If the message is placed to the spam folder or blocked altogether, check the report to see what caused the delivery issue. Is it missing authentication records? Blacklisted IP? Spam looking content? Once you find where the problem is, take time to fix it to get your future email campaigns delivered to the users’ Inboxes.
As a good email marketer, you can't simply send the email and forget it because if you don't know how the recipients treat your message, you won't be able to send them what they need or take any profit from your list.
So, the next step is to track the recipient's activity on your message.
How to Track Emails
Again, you can find many email tracking services on the Internet. I googled the "email tracking service" phrase and got 10+ pages. Just choose the service that suits you best. G-Lock EasyMail7 email sender software is integrated with our G-Lock Analytics email tracking service. In addition to tracking email opens and link clicks, G-Lock Analytics tracks who printed and who forwarded the message, who actually read the email and who simply skimmed or glanced it. You will also get the report about the email clients your recipients used to open your email — you will know which email clients/web based accounts you need to tailor your email for.
Needless to say, you must handle unsubscribe requests. G-Lock Analytics helps you with this task too. It provides you with the unsubscribe link that you can insert into your email. When a recipient clicks on the unsubscribe link, G-Lock Analytics records the click and the recipient's email address is added to the "Unsubscribe recipients" report. You can download the report to a file at any time and remove unsubscribed emails from your list.
You can use G-Lock Analytics with any email sender software that allows editing the message HTML source because this is where you need to add the tracking script. But if you send emails with G-Lock EasyMail7, software does almost everything automatically. Just read this quick tutorial to learn how to track emails using G-Lock Analytics service.
Well, I hope you get the idea how to send bulk emails now. You need to put some time and effort to set your email marketing program running. To start, just follow these steps:
- Put a signup form on your website or blog or create a squeeze page to get an email list.
- Download G-Lock EasyMail7 to send bulk emails to your list. Here is a quick guide how to send bulk emails using G-Lock EasyMail7.
- Signup with G-Lock Analytics to track emails.
