What is a Batch Email? (+10 Key Steps to Send Them Effectively)

Are you trying to send a mass email in Gmail but want to ensure your messages don’t appear spammy? A batch email campaign is a great solution to ensure you remain under Gmail’s daily sending limits and adhere to email marketing best practices for bulk messages.

In this article, we’ll review:

The meaning of the term “batch email”
The pros and cons of this approach
A step-by-step process to set up a batch email campaign

By the end, you’ll have the knowledge to deploy this strategy effectively and ensure your messages reach subscribers’ inboxes.

What is a Batch Email?

Batch emailing refers to staggering the number of messages you send to subscribers each day in order to avoid looking spammy or exceeding sending limits in Gmail or other email providers. It’s one of the best practices you can deploy when learning how to send mass emails.

Gmail and other email providers have sending limits to protect their users from spam. Many spam email accounts send the same message to a large number of recipients each day, so this is a common signal that email providers look for to determine whether emails are spam or not.

However, marketers with extensive email lists can get misinterpreted as spam due to these sending limits. For example, if you have a list of 9,000 subscribers and want to send the same promotional message to all of them, it would greatly exceed Gmail’s daily sending limit. Suddenly, you’ll notice your emails are constantly bouncing or landing in spam folders.

The best workaround is to batch your emails. This would work by taking that same list of 9,000 subscribers and breaking it down into groups that would receive your message throughout the week. If you send the same message to 1,800 subscribers each day over five days, you could inform everyone on your email list about your promotion without exceeding sending limits.

Batch Email vs Blast Email

Now, you might wonder, what’s the difference between batch and blast emails? The primary difference is how many subscribers receive your message in a single day.

An email blast is when you send the same message to everyone on your email list on the same day. However, if your list exceeds your email platform’s limit, many of your messages will likely bounce or get marked as spam due to exceeding that limit.

Batch emails are the workaround for successfully sending mass emails in Gmail. You stagger your message to gradually send it to everyone on your list while staying under the daily sending limit. Most companies can successfully send a batch email to everyone on their list over a week or two.

The Pros and Cons of Batched Emails

Email batching comes with its pros and cons. Let’s review both so you can make an educated decision before deploying this strategy.

The Pros of Batched Emails

The main advantages of batched emails are:

Avoid getting marked as spam: This is the primary reason why companies batch their emails. Exceeding Gmail’s sending limits can result in your emails bouncing or landing in spam folders, so many of your subscribers will never see your content in the first place.
Prevent long-term complications: Following this best practice will prevent any long-term complications from consistent email bounces or being marked as spam by email providers. Once you start getting marked as spam, it’s much more challenging to regain the trust of email providers and fix engagement issues.
Maintain high engagement rates: Doing everything you can to ensure your content reaches subscribers’ inboxes will ensure your engagement rates remain high and your campaigns are continuously successful.
Email marketing tools make the process easy: A batch email tool makes this process seamless. You upload your email list, adjust settings to your needs, and let it do the rest for you.

The Cons of Batched Emails

The main disadvantages of batched emails are:

You have to plan ahead: If you need to send a last-minute email blast to everyone on your list, the email batching strategy will not work. Most companies need at least a few days to stagger messages while remaining under Gmail’s sending limits, so you have to plan ahead with this strategy to deploy it effectively.
Not everyone on your list is informed at the same time: When you’re announcing big company news, email batching will result in some of your subscribers hearing it before others. In rare instances, it could result in some loyal customers feeling left out as others are reacting to the latest notification.
It could skew some results: Timing can impact results in email marketing. For example, say you’re warming up subscribers for a product launch. Subscribers who received the notification a few days before might have it fresh in their minds and be ready to purchase compared to those who received it a week ago and forgot about it.

While email batching has a few potential cons, using the right tools and planning your strategy ahead of time will offset many of those negative aspects. Plus, it’s an essential strategy in today’s email marketing world to ensure subscribers receive your content and email providers don’t think your messages are spammy.

How to Send a Batch Email Campaign with Mailsuite

Mailsuite is one of the best bulk email services for batch email campaigns. Here’s a step-by-step guide to set it up your first round of batch emails.

1. Compile Your Recipients Into a Google Sheet

Compile all your subscribers’ email addresses, names, and other essential information into an organized Google Sheet. Keep in mind that Mailsuite has a 10,000 subscriber limit for batch emailing.

2. Activate the Mailsuite Google Chrome Extension

To use the mail merge and the batch email tool, you’ll need an advanced membership with Mailsuite. Once you have the membership, navigate to the Chrome Web Store and search for “Mailsuite.” Then, follow the installation instructions to activate it for your Gmail account and browser.

3. Begin Composing Your Message and Activate a Campaign

Navigate to Gmail and click “Compose” in the top left-hand corner of the screen to start writing a new message. Then, click the “Campaign” button in the top right-hand corner of the message box that appears to start an email campaign with Mailsuite.

4. Click Personalize Campaign

After you’ve started a campaign, click the box that appears that says “Personalize Campaign.” You’ll be directed to upload your Google Sheet with your email list, and mail merge features will activate.

5. Compose Your Message

Write the message you want to send as a batch email. You can use Mailsuite’s mail merge tool to insert subscriber names or other essential information in the Google Sheet you uploaded to personalize your emails.

6. Click Continue

Once you’ve finished writing your message, click the “Continue” button at the bottom of the message box. Then, you’ll see the “Prepare for launch” dialogue box where you can set up a batch email campaign.

7. Click the “Schedule Send” Option

In the prepare for launch screen, you’ll see a button labeled “Schedule send” toward the bottom right-hand corner. Click it to move to the next step in the process.

8. Click the “Batch Send” Tab

After clicking the “Schedule send” button, you’ll move to a screen titled “Scheduled campaign.” Click the “Batch send” tab at the top of that screen.

9. Input the Settings You’d Like for Your Batch Email Campaign

Under the batch send tab, you’ll find several settings you can adjust for your batch email campaign. You can select the date to start your campaign, how many emails you want to send per day, and the days of the week and time of day you’d like to send emails. Note that you can only send a max of 2,000 emails daily to remain under Gmail’s sending limit (as of July 2024).

10. Click “Send Batch Campaign” to Active It

After you’ve input all your settings, all that’s left to do is click “Send batch campaign” in the bottom right-hand corner. From there, Mailsuite will handle the rest based on your settings. You can also use Mailsuite’s analytics tools to monitor how your campaign is performing as the batch send process rolls your message out to more subscribers.

Batch Email Limitations to Keep in Mind

When you’re using Mailsuite for batch email campaigns, you should keep a few limitations in mind. Planning for these ahead of time will ensure your campaign is as successful as possible. Those limitations are:

The maximum number of recipients you can run a batch campaign for is 10,000.
You can only send a maximum of 2,000 daily emails to remain under Gmail’s current sending limits.
The maximum sending limit accounts for all the campaigns you have active in a day. Therefore, you can’t have four active campaigns that all send 1,000 messages to subscribers each day. In that scenario, you’d still be limited to 2,000 total daily messages across all four campaigns combined.
A batch campaign can’t be configured to send later than two weeks after it was originally created.

Start Sending Batch Emails with Mailsuite

Mailsuite has the tools you need to optimize batch email campaigns for success. These include:

Easy settings that you can configure right in Gmail
Personalize your emails with mail merge
It ensures you remain under Gmail’s sending limits
Analyze the results of your campaign with data on open rates and link clicks

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Categories: Email Like a Pro