| PERSONALIZED MASS MAIL

You can now send customized emails to up to 1500 people. Organizations pay thousands of dollars for “mail merge” tools like this - it’s free and easy with Google Workspace.

This is how you can provide more value to your clients, unmatched by groups and BCC lists.

Multi-send is a new workflow in Gmail

To get started, write an email in Gmail. Enable "mail merge" from the address line and select a spreadsheet that contains email addresses. (You can also use contact lists.) Your message composer will turn purple.

Gmail may ask you to confirm which column in your spreadsheet contains the email address and the name. The best thing: You can use all columns as variables in your message text! This includes dates, entire text blocks, and more. You can also specify fallback values for your variables, if one of your clients should have a missing value.

Before sending, Gmail can send you a test email. You can proofread your final email in a browser, see how your variables resolve and check how everything looks on mobile. This gives you confidence your emails will be sent as you intended.

Once you send the email, every recipient will receive an individual email with only their address in the “TO” field. You can also CC a single email address if you like. You will see all emails in your “sent” folder for your reference.

Pro tips for mass mailing

With great power come some limitations. You can only contact up to 1500 people per day this way. After that, you have to wait 24 hours before you can send more multi-send emails - Gmail remains firmly anti-spam. Additionally, scheduled sending and confidential mode are disabled for multi-send mode. See this post for Gmail sending limits.

Keep storage low. All your recipients get their own individual email - if you send a 1 MB attachment to 1000 people, that’s 1 GB of storage. That’s different than CC’ing 1000 people in a single email! If you don’t work at a large company, you may not have infinite storage in Google Drive.

Drive attachments. You can attach files from Google Drive to your emails. This is a great way to share large files. Keep in mind that the total size of your attachments cannot exceed 25MB per email. Attaching Drive files allows you to change the file after you’ve sent an email, and even restrict access to it - the closest we have to true email recall. Keep in mind that recipients may need a Google Workspace account to open Drive attachments. Alternatively, you can attach normal files (see the point above), links to files stored elsewhere or links to sites.

Use Gmail templates. Gmail templates enable you to collaborate on emails. Your mass emails may need a second pair of eyes, and perhaps someone’s approval. Two people can send the same email using a Gmail template, which allows your team to break up very large distribution lists that would exceed your own daily quota.

Unsubscribe link: Gmail includes an unsubscribe link in your mass emails. If someone clicks it, they won’t receive future mass emails from you, but you can continue emailing them normally. You can delete this link, but there may be penalties (read: your email may go to spam more easily) if you do.

Multi-send saves your team time and reduces errors - and it enables you to provide better service with more relevant emails, especially if your personalization includes relevant information that saves the recipient time.

Multi-send is not a departure from Gmail’s anti-spam policy - because of its limitations, it’s not a tool for marketing departments. Comms teams still need a comms strategy that is not email. Instead, it empowers teams to talk to their clients in a more personalized way without spending money on complicated third-party tools. Or using scripts they found somewhere. Gmail saves you time and keeps you secure.

Next time you look at a list of people, ask if multi-send would provide more value to the recipients than the old BCC. Thanks for reading!

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