How To Email a Small Group of People the Right Way

Emailing has become second nature to many of us. We pretty much live by our email accounts. And especially if you are in business your email account and your email list can be the life blood of your business.

So it surprises me how many people are still emailing wrong. Yep, wrong…

When I say wrong I am not talking about spam or email content (although those are definitely topics that need to be addressed as well). What I am talking about is the actual mechanics of sending the email out.

Not those one and two emails you send each day to a bunch of different people but an email that is sent out to a group of people. Now the term group can mean different things to different people. Some people see 10 people as a group email while others don’t think it is a group email if it goes out to less than 100 people.

For our purposes I am talking about any single email that goes out to 10 or more people at the same time.

First Things First

You need to be using a service. These are companies that are created just for emailing bulk email to people on your “list”. They will make sure you are following the various laws that have been put into place in recent years and allow you to keep track of your outgoing group emails easier.

They are very easy to use and are very inexpensive to get started with. So there is NO excuse to not use one of the many email service providers that are available.

Next: Do Not User You Computer Email Program to Send Group Emails

There is more than one reason why you do not want to do this. First we will start with those laws I mentioned before. Those laws say that you HAVE to provide people with a way to be EASILY and IMMEDIATELY removed from your list. When you send an email to 10+ or 50+ people through a program like Outlook or Thunberbird there is no way to do this.

These programs were not meant for this use and they do not automatically add the items that the laws say you have to include in bulk emails.

The next reason not to use the address list and your personal email software is that there is too much possibility for mistakenly giving everyone of the list everyone else’s email address.

(By the way THIS is actually the reason for this post )

We have all seen it. The email that comes in to me and 67 of the sender’s friends, business associates and networking partners. And right there at the top is every single person’s email address.

This happens because they sent the email to one person and CC’d everyone else.

If you are going to send one email to more than one person and those people don’t know each other you at least need to “Blind CC” everyone. This way everyone you send the email to won’t be able to see everyone else’s email address.

By sending email this way (with openly visible email addresses) you are opening up a can of worms. People get VERY upset at their email address being “given” out to strangers.

This type of email sending also can cause issues when someone on that list hits “Reply to All” instead of just Reply and everyone you sent your email to gets that person’s response. Suddenly you have a MAJOR spam issue going on that you caused.

No matter how innocently this mistake happened, you reputation and your business can potentially be ruined by this issue.

So…if your list is 10 or 10,000 you need to be using an email service provider and learning how to correctly send emails out to your contacts. This simple skill will save you headaches and issues later on as your list grows along with your business.

About The Author:
Cindy Clemens is a mom, author, speaker, marketing consultant and Co-Founder of Your Marketing University. Her goal is to teach marketing in a simple easy to understand format that businesses can use to help gain marketing ideas & market their businesses to boost sales.

Are you marketing in sequence? Are you following a strategy or focusing on tactics? Claim your copy of our free “Small Business Marketing Roadmap Report” by my partner Ely Delaney to find out.