How to Send a Mass Email and Hide Recipients

Mass emailing has become one of the most efficient ways to reach as many people as possible without too much effort. When you are sending out a mass email, there are several key aspects that you need to pay attention to. In the end, most mass emails have a core objective: creating new opportunities. Whether it’s trying to build relationships with people in your industry or sending a temporary offer, you want to make sure you are getting the best results. Sending out a mass email takes some work to get it right as there are some things you should avoid, such as hiding the recipients who will receive this email. 

Before going further, just make sure you verify your email list from the industry's best bulk email verification tools. Because it helps you to reduce bounce rate, identifies temporary email addresses, protects your reputation, and you can generate the best ROI.

When should you send mass emails?

Mass emails are especially useful when you want to send the same information to different people. Let’s say you have a list of email addresses of current clients and want to reach out to them with a special promotion. Or your company is hosting an event soon and you want to make sure the people on your email list get their invites. A mass email allows you to send the same message to a list of people at once rather than having to send them an email individually. Sending a mass email will just take a minute if you have your message ready but sending 30 emails to people individually will take you up to 30 minutes. 

So, mass emails are a great way to save a lot of time while also ensuring that everybody on the list receives the same message. When sending individual emails, you might run into problems when pasting the message into each email. With a mass email, you just check the copy and lay-out once and when everything looks right you can instantly reach everybody on your list.

Here are some examples of situations where sending a mass email would be a great idea:

When shouldn’t you send mass emails?

Though mass emails are a great way to reach a lot of people at once, you can run into some problems when sending a single message. There’s a problem with a mass email: it’s not personal at all. So when you’re sending a message that needs to look personalized, sending a mass email is not the best option. Let’s say you want to send a pitch deck to investors. 

Sending a mass email without mentioning their first name or any other specific information will just make it look like you don’t really care whether they reply. Often, personalized emails will guarantee a higher success rate, as it looks like you’re really putting in the effort to connect with these investors.

The same problem occurs when you send out an email to a company you want to connect with to talk about potentially signing up as a new client. Most people get at least a dozen random emails a day that don’t look personal in any way. And it’s a shame because it simply looks like you haven’t really put any thought into who you’re talking to. 

Using “Hi,” rather than “Hi Stephen,” for example, already shows that you are most likely sending the same email to several people. As a new potential client, the approach of sending an email that is not personalized whatsoever will look bad. It’s obvious that you haven’t put much thought into why you are reaching out to this person. 

Why should you hide the recipients?

When sending mass emails you might want to hide the recipients. This is especially important when the receiver shouldn’t see who else got the email. Let’s say you want to send out a new promotion to your clients. By showing all the recipients’ addresses in the email, they can all see each other’s email addresses. This can quickly lead to complaints from your clients’ side, as they’d rather not have other people know their email address. People don’t like receiving SPAM emails and want to avoid it at all costs. Almost everyone would prefer to avoid this situation. 

In this same case, another reason to hide the recipients could derive from the fact you serve multiple clients in the same niche. Though most companies usually do not mind it, some companies might no longer work with you because they are now aware that you also work for a direct competitor. Sending a mass email without hiding the recipients could result in you losing valuable business opportunities. That’s why hiding the recipients in your emails is important.

Using BCC to send a mass email and hide recipients

When you’re sending out a new email, you have several options to select recipients:

When you’re using BCC for your mass mail, you will be able to hide the recipients. It’s a very easy way to hide the recipients and every popular email client offers the BCC option. BCC is short for ‘Blank Carbon Copy’. Recipients of these emails will be able to see all the ‘To:’ and ‘CC:’ recipients. 

Today, most people use the BCC option when they want to send out a mass email and hide recipients. It’s an effective way as it takes a few seconds to get everything lined up. You paste all the recipients into the BCC line and separate each address by using commas (most email clients already automatically separate email addresses and add commas). In the end, sending a mass email and hiding the recipients is relatively easy. Most email clients will also show the recipient that they were a BCC recipient in this email thread. 

Why should you use BCC?

BCC is an effective way to avoid the obstacles that we’ve previously talked about in this article. It allows you to send out an email to a few dozen recipients without looking like you’re sending a SPAM email. You will also be able to hide all the recipients, so you’ll avoid that the recipients will be aware of the other recipients. 

BCC is a common way to send out a mass email and hide the recipients. However, as mentioned in this article, it won’t allow you to personalize the email in any way. You will send a generic mass email to all the recipients and won’t be able to add any personal data such as:

• First name

• Last name

• The recipient’s company name. 

What are your options to send mass emails?

Because most popular email clients include the option to send a mass email to different recipients within the BCC line, we will discuss the different possibilities below. 

We will cover the following email clients:

• Gmail

• Outlook

• Thunderbird

Gmail

1. Compose a new email by clicking “Compose” within Gmail or pressing ctrl + C

2. Type your email subject

3. Copy the text into the email field and include your email signature

4. Click the ‘To:’ button above the email subject

5. Type your own email address in the ‘To:’ field

6. Copy all the email addresses from your list of recipients

7. Click on ‘BCC’ in the Gmail email composer

8. Paste all the addresses in the BCC field

9. Gmail will now automatically separate all the addresses so there’s no need to add any commas

10. Check the copy of your email subject and the content of the email

11. Click ‘Send’ or schedule the email 

Outlook

1. Compose a new email within your desktop application or the online version of Outlook

2. Type the email subject in the subject field

3. Copy your email content into the email field

4. Click on the ‘BCC’ button at the top of the email

5. Copy the email address from your list or sheet

6. Paste the addresses in the BCC field

7. Type your own email address in the ‘To:’ field

8. Check your email for any mistakes (don’t forget the email subject)

9. Press ‘Send’

Thunderbird

1. Click “Write” at the top of the menu bar

2. A new popup will open so you can type your email

3. Type a good email subject line

4. Copy the email message into the message field

5. Click the dropdown menu that says ‘To’ and select BCC

6. Copy the list of email recipients

7. Paste the email addresses in the BCC field

8. Type your own address in the ‘To:’ field

9. Check your email to avoid any grammar errors

10. Click ‘Send’ 

How to personalize your mass emails

As mentioned before, it is hard to personalize your mass emails while also hiding your recipients when you are using BCC. Because the email recipients all receive the same exact email, you can’t add any personalization. But in most cases, you want to add some form of personalization to make it look like you’re sending a personal email rather than a mass email.

In order to start personalizing your mass emails, you need to start collecting additional information about your recipients. For example, if you want to add the first name to every email, you need to have a list of the first names. This will allow you to create specific emails for every recipient using these personal details. It will result in personalized emails that don’t look like you’re sending them to multiple people.

Personalization can increase your success rate when sending out mass emails significantly. However, you need to make sure that all the personal information in the emails is up-to-date, doesn’t contain any errors and is appropriate to use. The latter is especially important. You don’t want to use personal information such as “I saw you visited Portugal last week when I checked your Facebook profile” when you’re reaching out to someone outside of your network. This will simply make it look like you’re going out of your way to finding personal information about them. 

How to store personal information

You can either collect all the personal details of your recipients in your own lists or create a new spreadsheet. Paste the email addresses in the first column and create additional columns to add more information such as the first names. 

If you’re sending out a mass email to recipients, such as your clients, you might already have all this information as they’ve submitted it they signed up for your product or service. If they haven’t submitted this information, you can simply check the emails they’ve sent you to get their first name and additional personal information. 

The popular email clients do not allow you to add any personalization to your mass email. Some might offer paid extensions to do so but require additional technical steps to ensure you are sending your emails properly. For most people, it is recommended to use a different type of software to send mass emails that allow you to hide the recipients so you will be able to add personal information in the email.

At Anyleads, we understand the importance of sending personalized emails that your prospects or current clients will engage with. And we also understand that you don’t want to spend hours creating lists of personal information to use in your personalized emails. That’s why we offer an efficient database with a lot of information about your prospects and clients, which you can then use within your own email outreach campaigns.

Let’s say you have a list of all your clients’ email addresses including first names and want to send them a personal invitation for an upcoming webinar. Sending a mass email and hiding the recipients by using BCC will not be the best option here, because you want to email to look professional and personalized. You can upload your list of email addresses and additional personal information into your Anyleads dashboard and create a business template based on the copy you have written for your email.

You can use parameters within the email, based on the column you are using in your spreadsheet, to use personalized information within your email. Information within a column named ‘Firstname’ can be used by copying the parameter ‘{Firstname}’ into your email copy. Our software will then identify that for every recipient, it needs to get the first name from the ‘First Name’ column and replaces the parameter with the personal information. It will instantly give your emails a much more personalized look, as every recipient will now receive an email that includes their first name. We call this the email merge.

How to automate your mass emails

Now that you’ve learned how to create great mass emails while not showing the addresses, it’s time to look at how you can automate this process in order to save time. When it comes to sending emails in the B2B space, you will often send out the same emails to different people at specific times. To avoid having to copy and paste your email copy to create new mass emails, it’s often more efficient to simply automate this process. 

For example, when you’re sending out a specific email to every new user that signed up for your product last week, you want to avoid having to send a mass email containing every new user. You will have to schedule this task every week and in the end, it will just be a time-consuming task. Instead, you should start automating these mass emails so you will be able to spend your time on other tasks. 

Why automation is the key to success

Automating your mass emails has several benefits:

• You only have to set up the automation once and it will run without you having to interfere with it

• You are less likely to make mistakes because you avoid any manual work

• You can send hundreds of emails a week 

• Every email will be personalized based on the data you provide

• You can further expand the automation by adding email sequences to send new emails a week from now, two weeks from now or at any time in the future

• You can also start testing different versions of a single email to understand which version results in the highest revenue or conversion rate

As you can see, automation will help you to take your company to the next level while also cutting out a lot of manual work. In the end, it’s one of the most efficient ways of cutting hours while also increasing results. 

The start of automating your mass emails

In order to start automating your mass emails you will need the following:

Creating your automated mass emails

You start by creating an overview containing the different types of emails you want to send to your prospects or clients. This can be a single email to introduce yourself or several emails with reminders of your previous emails, special offers such as a whitepaper or to schedule a call to talk about a demo. 

Email sequences can contain anywhere from one to up to unlimited different emails. Usually, you are safe with around 5 to 8 different emails in a sequence, as you don’t want to annoy your prospects or clients by sending them too many emails about a single topic. If people haven’t responded after 5 to 8 different emails, odds are that they might not respond at all. 

Within Anyleads, you can create a new template for every email within your sequence. You can then automatically or manually add email addresses to the recipient list (don’t forget to add additional information such as first name or last name). Anyleads connects with dozens of different types of software such as CRMs, landing page creators and lead generation tools that automatically upload the information into your recipient list. Once you’ve set up your connection or scheduled your weekly email addresses upload, you can create the whole sequence. Optionally, you can add different versions for every step within the sequence and start sending automated emails.

Our software also allows you to understand how well your emails are performing by tracking the open rates and click rates of every email you send. These statistics allow you to get more insights into how people are engaging with your mass emails. And best of all, every email you send is only sent to that specific person, so you’re sending out mass emails while also hiding the recipients' email addresses.