Sending guidelines

The best practices to send mail merge with Gmail

Mailmeteor sends emails directly from your Gmail account and adds a sending delay between each email sent. It will maximize your chances to land in the primary inbox and prevent your emails from falling into spam compared to other email sending platforms.

You will have to abide by Google’s anti-spam policies to maximize your email deliverability and send bulk emails in Gmail without getting blocked:

1) Warm-up your email account

If your Gmail account is new or if you have not sent a lot of emails recently, we recommend sending emails to a small list of recipients at first (20 to 50 recipients for example). Focus on open rates and engagement. As time goes on and results go up, start to grow your lists as you go. Slowly increase your sending volume over time.

2) Collect responses and reply back

The first email you send for your mail merge to new recipients should be entirely focused on getting as much engagement as you can. Gmail loves to see that first email getting clicks or replies from readers who are interested. It sets a deliverability precedent for the rest of the campaign. On the contrary, if no one opens or replies to your email, it sends a bad signal for later campaigns.

3) Personalize your emails

When you are sending emails in bulk, it’s a best practice to personalize emails. You will dramatically improve your results by tailoring your message to a specific audience. Make some research about the people you are writing to in order to better target your audience.

Try using personalized variables to further personalize your emails. For example, we recommend personalizing the subject line, as it might certainly increase your open rate:

Mailmeteor lets you personalize your email subject

4) Write like a human

Anti-spam filters can check email content and formatting to ensure it does not contain phishing or scam. You may check the following:

In addition, you may want to double check the following:

  • Make sure your sender information is accurate: these include the Date, From, To, and Subject of your email. Spam filters will check these fields to ensure there is nothing unusual there. For example, the name you use in the greetings should correspond to your recipient’s name in the To field.
  • Clean up the structure of your email (HTML code): your email is made of the HTML language. Unstructured HTML code will be suspect to spam filters. We recommend you to create your email directly in the Mailmeteor or Gmail text editor instead of copy-pasting text from elsewhere like Word, Google Docs or using an HTML template you’ve found on the internet.

5) Give your account a profile picture

It’s a simple fix but there’s a good chance it can improve your open rates and for that reason, it’s well worth the five minutes it’ll take to do it – give your email account a profile picture.

Give yourself a profile picture, it's an easy fix to better email deliverability

6) Make sure your contact list is clean

If your campaigns have a lot of bounces, Google will detect that your database is outdated or not legitimate. We strongly recommended you to keep your database as fresh and clean as possible.

When building your list, ensure the following:

  • Get permission from your recipients: if you didn’t receive explicit opt-in from your subscribers, that can lead to spam issues.
  • Keep your database fresh and clean: if your list contains lots of inactive or disabled email accounts where emails bounce, that looks spammy to filters. You can use email verification services to clean up your database. We partnered with the best email verification companies to offer you discount on their services.
  • Make sure your audience is engaged – if your campaigns have very low open rates, anti-spam filters might take this as a sign that your subscribers don’t want your emails, which can increase the list of getting marked as spam.

7) Provide a clear way to opt-out

Your recipients must have the ability to opt out of every email you send out. The way to opt-out can be a closing formula like “let me know if you don’t wish to receive more emails”. It needs to be clear & when people require you to opt-out, you cannot ignore them.

Adding an unsubscribe link in your emails if you are running opt-in marketing campaigns is recommended.

8) Don’t send too many emails at once

For large campaigns, try sending messages to one group of recipients, wait 24 hours, and then send to another group. Stagger mass communications over several days.

Using Mailmeteor’s Autopilot feature, you can set a maximum numbers of emails to send per day and define throttling, that is the space between emails.

Sending emails on Autopilot to maxime your deliverability

9) Make sure your messages are authenticated

Protect your account against phishing & prevent messages from being marked as spam by authenticating your account.

Before sending mass emails with Gmail, we recommend that you follow Google’s best practices to authenticate your account so as to ensure delivery and prevent spoofing. This guide will explain how to set up your SPF, DKIM and DMARC which are three of the main authentication methods for your emails.

10) Going further

Why are my emails going to spam with Gmail?

Spam are all unsolicited or undesired emails. To keep account safe and prevent spam, email providers like Gmail have developed anti-spam filters. If they detect something unusual, your emails may land in the spam folder.

The main reasons as to why emails land in spam are:

Applying the best practices described above will help you avoid getting flagged as spam.

Keep in mind that sometimes a perfectly legit email can end up in the spam folder for no obvious reason. If you have checked all items on the best practices list but still end up in spam, feel free to get in touch with us, one of our email deliverability expert will be glad to help!

Why Google blocked my emails?

Spam laws vary from one country to another, you need to check the applicable spam law in your country before sending campaigns.

How to comply to CAN-SPAM?

CAN-SPAM is a law that establishes the rules for commercial email and messages, gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them, and outlines the penalties in case the law is violated. We cannot but recommend following these few rules:

How to avoid the Gmail spam filters

To sum up, here are some important things to keep in mind when sending a Gmail mail merge:

Going further