Tips for Bulk Emailing

Use Tables

Inserting tables in your website can be very useful to display the information in an orderly way. It will also allow you to handle your text and graphics more precisely. If you use tables the images are more likely to stay in one place, and your mail will look like you wanted it to go out.

Check the group or event for duplicate email address

In "Advanced Search" use the "Duplicate Search" with only "email" ticked. On the drop down menu select group, and then type in the group you will be bulk mailing to, click on add, then click on search. This will pick up any email addresses that will receive the e-mail more than once in the specific group that you searched for.
If it is a genuine duplicate, we advise you to clean it up immediately. This is done by clicking on the Duplicate Merge Icon . Once you have merged the duplicate, click on save. Work through all the duplicates in the group.
In the instance where a company has given one address for a couple of different people - make the call whether to send just the one, or to them all. (Each individual mail will be named for each different person.) Bear in mind though - that if one of the contacts clicks on the Unsubscribe link, that email address will be unsubscribed from the bulk mailing system.

Avoid sending large attachments and inserting large images

Sending large attachments is not considered polite and also slows the system down.
As a rule, never send attachments bigger than 300kb.
Images should not be larger than about 50kb, especially if you have a number of them in the mail, this also adds to the mail becoming large and will increase the time it takes to send the mail.

Send a test email to yourself first.

Create a test group to always send bulk mails to before you send them out. Have team members check the test, as they may spot typos or other errors. rather test the mail on them, than send a bulk mail out to a number of contacts, and then notice an error. Remember that once a mail is sent, there is no way to stop it.

Sending emails to large groups:

With a large bulk mail, there are bound to be bouncebacks, which will come to the From Address in your bulk mail composer.

These bounce backs are a good way to clean up your database. Make the time to go through the bouncebacks - some will be out of office replies, some will be inbox full messages - not all will be invalid mail addresses.

Expect a 25% bounce back rate due to incorrect e-mail addresses and security blocks on people's email clients.

Bulk e-mail logs - use the bulk mail icon on the right of the organisation/group or event name

Avoid listing the members/delegates and ticking them, in order to send bulk mail. The bulk mail logs will only show up correctly as having been sent to the whole group (or event, or organisation) if you have used the icon to the right of the group name. If you have ticked contacts to send a mail, the log will say selection - not the group or events name.