Mass emails from your regular mailbox hurt your deliverability and your security. Use an email marketing platform instead.
Imagine The holidays are coming and you want to send all your clients a nice greeting. You open Outlook, write the email, add a nice image and send it to all your contacts, neatly in BCC. A little later you want to email a colleague, and you get an error: "421. Sorry, you have temporarily been blacklisted."
Sending a mass email to your entire client base without an email marketing platform seems harmless. It isn't. It causes technical problems, and it's a risk to your company's security.
Outlook and Gmail are made for messages between individuals or small groups. They aren't suited to managing client data extensively or running marketing campaigns, and so not for a mass email either.
With mail merge you combine a text in Word with a list of contacts in Excel, in Outlook. Handy, but meant for a few dozen emails at most. If you send hundreds, Microsoft may block your mailbox to protect the system.
Providers use automatic spam filters. When many emails are sent at once from one IP address, they see it as unusual behaviour and may block your account. Your domain can end up on a blacklist, delaying or even blocking all your email traffic.
An email marketing platform such as Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign is built to reach large groups at once. It sends emails in small batches, meets Google's and Microsoft's authentication rules, and gives recipients the option to unsubscribe. That keeps your emails from being seen as spam and your reputation with providers from dropping.
A regular mail client isn't made to manage thousands of recipients securely and can be more vulnerable to attacks such as spoofing or phishing. An email marketing platform protects your clients' contact details.
Mass emails fall under the GDPR. From your regular mailbox you often don't record that you have consent, and recipients can't unsubscribe. That way you risk breaking privacy law.
Most providers limit the number of emails per day. A mass email can quickly exceed that limit, leaving you temporarily unable to send regular emails too.
An email marketing platform lets you personalise emails, segment your audience and track open and click rates. With a regular mail client you miss those insights.
Reason enough to stop running your client communication through your regular mailbox. There are plenty of accessible platforms, and the step is small.
In short
Mass emails from your regular mailbox can get your domain blacklisted Mail merge is meant for dozens of emails, not hundreds An email marketing platform handles unsubscribes, authentication and privacy
The information in this article is intended as general knowledge about using Apple products in a professional environment. Your organisation may have its own policies that restrict certain features or software. Always consult your organisation's IT policy before changing anything on company hardware or software.
