Bulk email or mass email marketing is the practice of sending huge volumes of email to subscribers with a single purpose. This is to reach out to many customers and increase the return-on-investment (ROI) of an email marketer through increased sales or engagement.

But an email marketer can’t just send bulk emails from the get-go. There are rules to follow before doing so, and the first step is IP warming. Find out its importance, how to do it, and the other strategies to follow for a successful mass email marketing.

1. Make sure you do IP warming

You need to build a reputation first. Don’t send massive email campaigns immediately. You’ll get blacklisted. Make internet and email service providers (ISPs and ESPs) trust you. To do that, you must gradually increase the volume of campaigns you send daily on a predetermined schedule.

An example of a schedule can be 2x-3x-4x. That means on the second day since you started sending campaigns, you must double the number of campaigns you send on that first day. Then thrice on the third day and quadruple on the fourth.

2. Have a single purpose for every mass email campaign

There are nine purposes for email campaigns. They can be for a welcoming, newsletters, promotion, seasons, triggered action, post-purchase drip, connect-via-social, abandoned cart, or re-engagement.

What matters is that every mass campaign must have a clear call-to-action (CTA )at the end. Let’s just say you’re making a newsletter campaign. Its purpose is to tell your customers what’s going on in your business. That campaign should be solely for an informational purpose alone.

There shouldn’t be a hint of product promotion or something saying about an abandoned cart.

3. Write quality email content

Successful email marketing will never be complete without quality content. To define quality content means campaigns that your customers want are interested in, match their preferences, and reflect their demographics.

For example, if your audiences are middle-class women in their 20’s and your business is more on sports apparel, that means your customers should be sent promotional campaigns of trendy activewear for females.

You shouldn’t send them promotions about city fashion, men’s activewear, or gaming peripherals because that would be totally out of place. Another thing, make your campaigns as professional as possible. That means no grammatical and spelling errors and no usage of spammy words.

4. Track important metrics

Metrics define how well your campaigns fare after being sent. There are two major types of metrics. The first is engagement rates. These are metrics that show how many of your customers opened or ignored your email, clicked a link in the campaign, and purchased your website.

The second metric is deliverability rates. These metrics show how many of your emails got bounced, rejected, ignored, flagged, or blocked by ISPs and ESPs. It’s essential to monitor your engagement metrics because you’ll notice your customers’ behaviors and make changes to your future campaigns that would guarantee being opened by them.

For deliverability metrics, regular tracking gives you the insight to make campaign adjustments as well. The only difference is instead of appeasing customers; you’re appeasing the ISPs and ESPs’ systems into helping you land your campaigns in your customers’ inboxes.

You can also use a verification tool to determine if your campaigns are inbox-worthy by ISPs and ESPs before being sent.

5. Use SMTP relay services

As your business grows, so does your mailing list. Standard email accounts have a low daily sending cap. That means using an ordinary email address for marketing will no longer be enough to keep you in touch with your growing customer base.

To increase your daily email sending cap, you must use a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMPT) relay service. The best part of using SMTP relay is that not only will it help you stay connected to your growing customer base; it also opens opportunities for reaching out to more potential customers.

6. Assign your customers into segmented lists

A single campaign format, writing, content, or sending schedule will no longer apply to all subscribers in a growing mailing list because customers from all walks of life will subscribe. A male customer from the other side of the world and another female from a different time zone might join your list.

To keep all your customers happy, segment them based on their attributes. You can get their basic information through the form of cookies on your website. But to really improve customer experience, ask them to provide their information during the subscription process. You’ll also keep spambots away that could make your metrics inaccurate.

7. Personalize

After list segmentation, send personalized marketing campaigns appropriate to the users in the different segmented lists. For example, customer A is a married 26-year-old woman that lives in this area of the world, and customer B is a single 30-year-old man in another area of the world.

Both customers are placed in their respective list segmentation, and each of them receives a differently-formatted campaign but with the same CTA. Customer A is addressed with Mrs. followed by her first name, and Mr. addresses customer B followed his first name.

The users in the list where customer A belongs received your campaigns at 4 pm in your time zone because it’s 6 am in theirs. The users in the list where customer B belongs received your campaign at 10 pm in your timezone because it’s 6 am in theirs as well.

Both customers have a high rate of opening your campaigns because they received your message right when they wake up. You also captured their attention because you addressed them directly in your opening line.

Final Thoughts

Doing successful bulk email marketing is a two steps-by-two steps process. You must start at the bottom of the stairs through IP warming while practicing the craft of creating single-purpose quality content. Once you take the steps upward, you must learn to juggle the responsibilities of maintaining quality content production while tracking your metrics.

On the higher steps, you’re expected to have mastered the craft of making quality campaigns. This is the part where you’ll both track your metrics while using an SMTP relay. At the peak level of mass email marketing, you should be able to create single-purpose personalized quality content while tracking your metrics accurately and growing your customer base.