In the world of online sales and marketing, it’s common practice for organizations to get in touch with a long list of contacts at the same time while simultaneously making the message seem personal.
To email each recipient individually would clearly be out of the question. Thankfully, there are ways in which a personalized email can be sent in a mass campaign, where each recipient is prevented from seeing who else is receiving the same message.
Here, we’ll show you how Gmail can help you with this and how Right Inbox has a special new feature to make it even more straightforward.
- Why you Might Need to Hide Recipients in a Mass Email
- How to Use the BCC method in Gmail
- Potential Problems with BCC in Gmail
- Using Mail Merge within Gmail
- Introducing Right Inbox’s “Mail Merge for Gmail” feature
- Summary
Why you Might Need to Hide Recipients in a Mass Email
All sorts of departments might have reason to hide recipients in a mass email.
The most obvious ones are sales and marketing teams, needing to reach client and prospect lists in one big campaign. Recruitment agencies and organizations might also need to hide recipients in their mass communications to members or customers.
In all of these examples, it would be poor practice to reveal each email address to all recipients. Not only is it a privacy breach, but it also looks somewhat unsophisticated in 2022!
The advantage of hiding email addresses in a mass campaign is that it feels more personalized, less spammy, and is more likely to elicit a positive response. The net result is higher engagement and a smaller chance of your email being banished to the spam folder or deleted outright.
How to Use the BCC method in Gmail
To use the BCC method within Gmail, you can follow these steps to ensure your recipient email addresses are hidden:
- Open Gmail and sign in.
- Open a new email and write the message you intend to send to your contact list.
- Click BCC in the top-right of your Compose window.
- Add all the email addresses to which you intend to send the message. It might help to copy and paste your list into this field.
- Add an email address into the “To” field. Since your email has to be sent to someone, you do need to enter a direct email address, even if it is your own.
Potential Problems with BCC in Gmail
Even though Gmail makes it easy for you to send bulk email campaigns, it does have some issues to be aware of.
1. BCC looks unprofessional
Although using BCC in Gmail is a good workaround if you don’t regularly send out mass email campaigns, it’s not as elegant as other tools and features available.
While recipients will not be able to see who else is receiving the email, they’ll be able to see themselves listed as a BCC instead of a direct recipient in the “To” field. This in itself will suggest to them that they’re receiving a mass email.
The worst-case scenario is that Gmail will interpret this email as spam and direct it to your recipients’ Spam or Junk folders.
2. You can’t capture data insights
If you’re sending out a mass campaign using BCC, it’s impossible for you to track who has opened the email, let alone other data such as click-through rate, and the time recipients opened the email.
3. You might reach Gmail’s sending limit
Gmail typically has a generous sending limit of hundreds per day, but if you’re sending a BCC email to more than your allocated amount, you may need to consider whether Gmail is the right tool for your campaigns.
4. You can’t personalize the email
When you’re using BCC, you’re unable to fully personalize the message by using, for example, a recipient’s first name. Online email marketing software will let you automate this and ensure that a more tailored message is sent to each of your customers, even when you’re sending out one message to a database of contacts.
Using Mail Merge within Gmail
Rather than using BCC, there is an option to use Mail Merge in Gmail. There are several complicated steps to this, but for more, you can read our step-by-step guide here.
Introducing Right Inbox’s “Mail Merge for Gmail” feature
Because using BCC within Gmail isn’t the best way to send a mass email campaign.“Mail Merge for Gmail”, part of the Right Inbox Chrome extension, lets you contact
multiple recipients with a customized message, and thereby scale your outreach without using the personal touch.
It’s not straightforward using Gmail to send a bulk email campaign, whether you’re using Mail Merge or BCC, but our new feature
removes the unnecessary steps, making it a much easier process. With Mail Merge for Gmail you can:
- Contact a large number of people with a customized personal message
- Improve and scale your cold email outreach within Gmail
- Use together with Sequences to automatically follow-up with prospects
- Used together with email tracking you can also see who’s opened your email and how many times they’ve opened it.
Not only this, but it gives you insight into how many recipients have opened your email, in which location and on what device, and how many have clicked on any links within your message. This kind of insight, combined with Right Inbox’s Sequences, will let you follow up on your campaigns in a targeted, useful way.
Summary
Gmail will let you email several recipients at a time while preventing them from knowing who else is receiving the same email. This is good news to anyone who needs to reach lots of people with the same message, but without the danger of privacy violations.
That said, this process is lacking in sophistication, and can easily result in your messages slipping straight into recipients’ spam folders.
With Right Inbox’s Mail Merge for Gmail feature, you can reach a bulk contact list with one message while also personalizing the message to each recipient. And with its ability to let you track your recipients’ opens, click-through, location, and device, your email campaigns will be supercharged with the added sophistication of a CRM.