Perfecting bulk emails: 8 best practices to stay out of spam

On the face of it, bulk emailing is an easy way for B2B sales and marketing professionals to reach a wider audience efficiently. What's not to love?

Well, successful bulk emailing requires careful consideration to ensure you don’t end up risking your brand's reputation. Aside from alienating your potential prospects, bad bulk email sending could land you in serious technical deliverability trouble, especially since Email Service Providers (ESPs) Google and Yahoo took action to crack down on spam email senders.

In this guide, we'll explore the best practices for sending bulk emails in B2B sales and 8 tried and tested strategies to help keep your emails safe from spam filters - and keep them landing in your prospect inboxes as they should!

What are bulk emails?

Bulk emails, also known as email blasts, involve sending large numbers of targeted emails to multiple recipients at once. 

Marketers and salespeople use the bulk email or mass mailing approach to communicate announcements, offers, or other news at scale, fast. What bulk emails lose in personalization they gain in efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

What's the difference between bulk and spam emails?

Whilst you might hear people complaining about them as if they’re one and the same, bulk and spam emails technically refer to different concepts! 

While bulk emails are sent to a specific, targeted audience who have shown interest or have a prior relationship with the sender, spam emails are unsolicited and often unwanted.

Bulk email senders have a legal obligation to make sure they only send emails to leads or customers with a qualified interest, and this is what helps keep them from being junk mail. 

Email providers use automated spam filters to protect their users from receiving unwanted spam content by checking for certain spam keywords, formatting, or poor sender reputations. 

We mentioned above that bulk senders have a responsibility to carefully manage their email lists to ensure they’re providing value to recipients, but unfortunately, they can still be flagged as spam - either by an individual recipient or by an email service provider. And if that happens too frequently, your deliverability will take a hit across the board and you'll see more and more of your organization's emails getting blocked.

But in an ideal world, your bulk email is never spam - and here’s how to make sure of it!

8 bulk email best practices to stay out of spam

1. Choose your domain

Choose a reputable domain for sending bulk emails, ensuring it is at least 30 days old to establish credibility. Avoid spelling errors in domain names and ensure that the content of your emails aligns with the domain's purpose and looks reputable.

Your domain’s reputation will strengthen over time, so the older and more secure your domain, the better. You can also opt to use sub-domains to leverage your parent domain’s reputation without having to pay extra.

2. Warm up your domain

Always warm up your domain before using in your marketing or sales efforts! Email warming works by sending emails in batches to supportive recipients whose replies help corroborate the legitimacy of your domain as a non-spam entity. Tools like Amplemarket’s Email Deliverability Booster automate this process over a controlled period to ensure your domains are all set for outbound success.

3. Clean your email lists

Before sending bulk emails, check that your email list consists of valid email addresses and active subscribers with a confirmed interest in your brand. Using a data provider like Amplemarket to enrich your CRM ensures your lists will have up-to-date contact information, reducing your risk of emails bouncing and your deliverability taking a hit.

4. Create value-driven content

Focus on creating content that actually addresses your audience's interests and challenges so they will want to open and read on! You need to refine everything from subject line to email length (consider A/B testing) and make sure you highlight your value propositions in a way that resonates with the reader. Don’t forget to include clear and concise calls-to-action so your reader can engage straight away.

5. Include an obvious unsubscribe button

Provide recipients with the option to opt out of receiving further emails by including a visible unsubscribe button. This not only keeps you compliant with regulations like CAN-SPAM and GDPR but also helps you target prospects more effectively.

6. Choose an Email Software Provider

Invest in a reliable email software provider to automate bulk email sending, manage contact data, and track performance metrics. Manual bulk email management can be time-consuming and complicated, so you might consider looking for platforms that include such as email and trigger-based workflow automation, A/B testing, reporting, and AI-writing assistants.

7. Check your spam rates

Sign up for Google Postmaster Tools (it’s free!) to monitor your organization’s spam rates. If your spam rate climbs above 0.3% for a sustained period, expect to see your deliverability issues increase for Google recipients.

8. Stay up to date on spam recommendations

Email Service Providers are constantly innovating to tackle new spam threats, so it’s important you keep an eye on current data and privacy legislation and spam policies to avoid any nasty surprises in your bulk sending. Check out this blog for more information on the latest policy updates from Google and Yahoo.

The key to successful bulk emailing

With the right tools to handle your email warm-up, contact data, and email scheduling, scaling your outbound bulk emails needn’t be a hassle. Keep our best practices in mind and focus on delivering real value and you won’t have to sacrifice quality of outreach for quantity!

Remember, if you're sharing a domain across your organization, it's everyone's responsibility to look after it. Check out how you can effortlessly manage and monitor multiple domains and mailboxes with Amplemarket's AI-powered deliverability tools!