2016 is shaping up to be one of the most contentious and important election years in history. Local, state, and federal races are heating up and campaigns for candidates and causes are gearing up to garner votes.
Many voters remain undecided until the moment they step into the voting booth, so it behooves campaigners to be persistent, consistent, and responsive right up to the finish line.
Experienced marketing professionals and winning campaign managers know that the campaign that wins the race is the one that does the best job delivering their message to undecided voters.
An article from NPR.org “Political Campaigns Go Social, But Email Is Still King” said that “on the Democratic side, the Obama camp took 90 percent of their online money from emails in 2012.” That’s impressive, and indicates the high impact of email marketing.
GMass is the ideal platform for savvy political campaign strategists to design, build, and deploy email blasts. Some of the features that are particularly effective for reaching voters are:
•Tracking – You’ll know who opens your emails and who clicks on your calls to action.
•Personalization – Placing your recipient’s name into the subject line and body of the email boosts the open and click rates for your campaigns. GMass makes this an easy step.
•Automatic Follow-Up – Set a campaign once, and let it run. Voters who don’t open or click your
message after the first send will be sent automatic reminders if you wish. This feature saves time and increases overall effectiveness.
•Mail-Merge – Connecting your list of donors to GMass is seamless and makes setting up campaigns easy.
GMass is a ★★★★★ reviewed extension on the Chrome Web Store and works with any active Gmail account. One of the best GMass features is that because the emails are sent through your Gmail account, they are less likely to be stopped with spam filters. GMass users enjoy the highest delivery, open, and click rates in the email marketing industry.
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Several users have reported that in the last few days, sending to yahoo.com email addresses, and email addresses hosted by Yahoo has resulted in a bounce because Yahoo blocked the email.
Which users were affected?
Only GMass users who sent from a regular Gmail account, meaning an email address @gmail.com or @googlemail.com were affected. Google Apps users were not affected. The issue affected campaigns sent between 2016-07-11 18:28 GMT and 2016-07-14 04:00 GMT.
What exactly happened?
Yahoo has indeed been bouncing emails containing the shared tracking domain for GMass users with regular Gmail accounts (not Google Apps). Specifically, any email sent to an @yahoo.com address containing the domain gmss5.com bounced with this message: Technical details of permanent failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain yahoo.com by mta5.am0.yahoodns.net. [98.136.216.25].
The error that the other server returned was: 554 Message not allowed – [PH01] Email not accepted for policy reasons. Please visit https://help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster/SLN5067.html [120] This issue does not affect Google Apps users (those using Gmail but with their own company domain), because the shared tracking domain for Google Apps users is different than the shared tracking domain for regular Gmail users. The shared tracking domain assigned to Gmail users was blacklisted by Yahoo, thus resulting in the bounces.
We have now resolved the issue by replacing the blacklisted tracking domain with a new tracking domain, but additionally, we have taken several other clean-up actions:
1. We have updated our reply management filters so that bounce like the sample above is categorized as a block instead of a regular bounce. GMass’s reply management system categorizes replies to an email campaign, and in this case, the message above indicates a block rather than a traditional bounce which means the email address is simply invalid.
2. Because previously the reply management system was treating messages above as regular bounces, it means that those @yahoo.com recipient addresses would have been added to the respective account’s Bounce list, therefore suppressing sends to that address in the future. Since the recipient address is actually valid, we have removed all affected @yahoo.com addresses from the GMass bounce tables. Approximately 6,000 yahoo.com email addresses (and addresses hosted by yahoo.com) have been deleted from the GMass bounce tables.
3. We have replaced the shared tracking domain used by Gmail users (www.gmss5.com), that was the cause of the Yahoo blocking, with a new tracking domain (which we won’t specify here).
Why did this happen, and what can you do to prevent it from re-surfacing?
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The automatic follow-up email feature allows you set a an automatic timed sequence of emails to be sent to your recipients until they reply or open or click. Sometimes this is also known as a drip campaign or a sequence campaign and is popular amongst cold emailers.
You can also set up your sequence so every recipient gets every email regardless of whether they open, click, or reply — say, for instance, a welcome series where you’re introducing someone to a set of features.
In the GMass interface inside Gmail, it’s easy to set the text of the follow-up email using the default “Send text above original” option, but this option is limited to just text without rich formatting. (You can use mail merge tags.)
Still, even without rich formatting, this option will suffice for most users wanting to use the automatic follow-up email feature.
But… if the plain text option doesn’t suffice for your purposes and you want to apply formatting like hyperlinks, formatted text, images, or attachments to the follow-up email, then you need to choose the Send rich text… option rather than Send text above original.
You’ll also need to use the rich text option if you want your follow-up to start a new thread with a new subject line, rather than going out as a reply in the same thread as the initial email.
This article will teach you how to create the follow-ups you can choose from that dropdown, as well as how to edit those follow-up templates in the future.
In order to set formatted content as a follow-up email, you first need to create the content and save it in the GMass system.
How to Create and Use a Rich Text Follow-Up Template
Creating your rich text follow-up template
Click the plus sign button (+) in the Auto Follow-up section of the GMass campaign settings box.
A new Compose window will launch with the To address and Subject pre-filled.
Do not edit the email address in the To field. That address is used to save your template in the GMass system.
You can (and should) replace the subject line. That’s especially true if you are sending this email in a new thread where your recipients will see the subject line. But even if you’re going to send this in the same thread, the subject line is useful for identifying this email template in the follow-up dropdown menu in the settings.
Now compose the message by deleting the text that’s already there. You can use the same mail merge tags you’re using in your initial email template as well. You can use links, font colors, and even attachments.
You can set the preview text for your message in the GMass settings box for the follow-up template. Go to the Advanced section to edit the Preview Text.
You can also set a Friendly Name for your campaign — that’s an internal use field that your recipients will never see. You’ll also be able to see the Friendly Name in the follow-up template dropdown.
In the example here, I’ve used the Friendly Name to add some identifying info about this template to help me know exactly what it is in the future.
Once you’re all set, click the red GMass button to save the follow-up template into your account, so you can choose it from the dropdown later.
You should see this pop-up message telling you all was successful.
Using your rich text follow-up template
In the initial campaign email draft, re-open the GMass settings and head back into the Auto Follow-up section. GMass auto-saves your settings so you don’t have to worry about losing any of your work on these follow-ups through this process.
Then click the refresh button next to the template dropdown.
Select the template you just created from the dropdown. The friendly name is bolded and in brackets; the subject line is in purple. If you didn’t create a friendly name, you’ll just see the subject line. You can also search for templates in the box by name, or use the search filter is:template to just show your auto follow-up and triggered email templates.
You can view your template by clicking the eye icon.
How to Edit a Rich Text Follow-Up Template
Let’s say you want to edit a rich text follow-up template you’ve previously used. Rather than having to go through the entire creation process described earlier in this article you edit the template on the spot.
After you’ve chosen the template you want to edit from the follow-up dropdown, click the pencil icon.
GMass will bring up the Compose window with your follow-up template.
Once again, don’t touch the address in the To field — that address is how GMass gets your edited template into the system.
You can edit the subject line and email body here.
You can also edit the preview text and friendly name for the template.
Warning: If your follow-up message had attachments, you’ll need to re-add those manually when you edit the template. GMass will give you a warning if you’re facing that scenario.
And when you’re ready to save your edited template, click the GMass button to save it.
Now when you refresh the template box you’ll see your edited template there.
To see how your sequence will look and test your templates, you can use GMass to send a test of all the stages of your email.
And we’re all set! You should now be all set creating and editing rich-text auto follow-up templates for your campaigns.
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When connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet to send a mail merge campaign, you can now specify filter criteria to pull only certain email addresses that match the criteria.
You’ll notice a new Filter Rows box when connecting to a spreadsheet.
This post explains how to use the Filter Rows box and what to type to send email to just the rows that match your criteria. Specify one criteria per line, in the format:
ColumnName=Value
For example, if you have a spreadsheet column called Company, and you want to send a mail merge campaign to just everyone who’s Company is “Microsoft”, you would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Instead of the = sign, you can instead use the ~ operator to represent “contains”. For example, let’s say that your email addresses are in a column called Email. You want to send to only @yahoo.com addresses. You would enter:
Email~yahoo
meaning all rows where the Email value contains “yahoo”.
Full List of Operators
Along with = and ~ you can also use these operators:
!= for "not equals"
> for "greater than"
>= for "greater than or equal to"
< for "less than"
<= for "less than or equal to"
~ for "contains"
= for "equals"
Examples
You can use the operators above to compare strings, numbers, and dates. For example, if you have a spreadsheet column called Age, and you wanted to email just the adults in the spreadsheet, you could set:
Age >= 18
Or, let’s say you didn’t have an Age column but instead had a DateOfBirth column. Then you could set:
DateOfBirth <= 1/1/1999
assuming that anyone born before 1/1/1999 is an adult.
Special Values
There are two special values you can use to represent date values. These are:
CurrentDate
CurrentDateIgnoreYear
You can use these values to compare the data in your spreadsheet to the current system date (in the GMT time zone). For example, if you have a column in your spreadsheet called ShipDate, which represents when a customer’s order will be shipped, you could set:
ShipDate=CurrentDate
to pull just the rows where the order’s shipping date is today to let the customer know that their order has been shipped and will arrive soon.
Using CurrentDateIgnoreYear matches just the Month and Day parts of the date to the current Month and Day. For example, if you have a column called Birthday and you want to send an email to people only on their birthdays, but birthdays include the year the person was born, then this will be useful. If three of your birthday values are: 1/1/72, 4/5/80, and 3/1/90, then using “Birthday=CurrentDate” would never match the rows because the rows contain the birth year. Using “Birthday=CurrentDateIgnoreYear” however would match rows on a person’s birthday. Also, see the detailed guide to sending birthday emails with Gmail and GMass.
Multiple Criteria
You can also specify multiple criteria. Let’s say your spreadsheet has the columns Company and Position. Let’s say you want to send to everyone whose Company=Microsoft, and Position=Manager. You would enter:
Company=Microsoft Position=Manager
Or, let’s say that in your actual spreadsheet, the Position column had values like “Product Manager” and “Technical Support Manager”, but you still wanted to email everyone at Microsoft that was some type of manager. In that case you would set the Position criteria to just “contain” the word “manager”. So:
Company=Microsoft Position~Manager
In these cases, you want rows that match both criteria. So in these cases, the boolean operator should be set to AND. You might, however, want to switch to OR in certain cases. Let’s say your spreadsheet has all of your customers but you want to send a campaign to only customers with an email address at a consumer domain, like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and gmail.com. You would enter:
And you would set the boolean dropdown to OR. Meaning you want to send to everyone where Email contains gmail.com OREmail contains yahoo.com OREmail contains hotmail.com OREmail contains aol.com.
As another example, let’s go back to our spreadsheet containing the Company column. You’re sending a mail merge campaign to executives at billion-dollar tech companies, so you want to only send to people where Company is either Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook. You would enter:
Company=Microsoft Company=Apple Company=Facebook
and set the boolean dropdown to OR. If you entered this criteria and set the boolean dropdown to AND, you would get an error saying that no rows could be selected, since there isn’t a single row where the Company is equal to all three of those values, as that would be impossible!
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GMass offers a number of ways to personalize the Subject and Message of your mail merge campaigns sent with Gmail. From basic mail-merge style personalization to fallback values to automatic-first-name detection and even personalized images, links, and attachments, this guide takes you through all of the options.
Simple Personalization:
How to Send Mass Emails with Personal Names in Gmail
At the most basic level, you can use {FirstName} and {LastName} to personalize emails if you’re sending to email addresses that are your existing Gmail Contacts, meaning people with whom you’ve had prior email conversations. Your Gmail Contacts contain names along with email addresses. (By the way, “Gmail contacts” and “Google contacts” are the same thing.)
If you’re connecting to a Google Sheet, then you can use any column from the spreadsheet to personalize, like {Company}, {LastPurchase}, or {DateOfBirth} for example, assuming that your spreadsheet contains the columns Company, LastPurchase, and DateOfBirth.
You can use these simple personalization variables in the Subject and Message.
1. GMass provides a dropdown menu in the Settings panel to insert personalization variables.
Choose a personalization tag, and it will be copied to your clipboard so you can easily paste it into your Subject or Message.
2. You can also just type a left curly bracket anywhere and you’ll instantly get a dropdown from which you can choose your merge tag.
Just type a left curly bracket character anywhere and you’ll get a dropdown for simple merge tag insertion. Of course, you can also just manually type the personalization tag surrounded by curly brackets, but that’s prone to typos.
Fallback Values
If you know that your personalization variables will have a value for some email addresses but won’t for others, you can set a fallback value to be used when the personalization value is blank. For example, you could use {FirstName|Friend} in your message. If a “FirstName” is available, it will be substituted; otherwise “Friend” will be substituted. You can use the fallback value syntax, a pipe symbol, followed by the fallback value, with any personalization variable.
Google Sheets vs Gmail Contacts/Google Contacts
If you’re connecting to a Google Sheet, then the Personalizationdropdown in the GMass Settings Box will contain an option for each column heading in your spreadsheet. If you are not connecting to a spreadsheet, then you’ll just get the standard FirstName, LastName, EmailAddress personalization options, where the values correspond to the email addresses and names of your Gmail Contacts.
Multi-Word Names
Personalized mass emails can get tricky when the names associated with your Gmail Contacts have not just two words, but three or four words. This is especially common in East Asian cultures. But there is a solution.
Rather than FirstName and LastName, which will use the first word of the name and the last word of the name, you can instead use the syntax {Name1}, {Name2}, {Name3}, and {Name4}. Name1 corresponds to the first word in the name, Name2 to the second word, and so on.
For example, if you are sending to a Gmail Contact that looks like:
Asian convention dictates that you address someone by all three words of the name, so in this case you would use:
Dear {Name1} {Name2} {Name3}:
at the beginning of your message.
Automatic First Name Detection
GMass has developed an algorithm that can accurately detect someone’s first name just from their email address. To insert the auto-detected first name, use the syntax {auto-first}. Again, you can use this syntax in the Subject and Message. In the example below, we auto-detect the first name and use a fallback value of “old friend” in cases where the first name cannot be detected.
Combining techniques
You can use personalization values along with auto first name detection and fallback values to compose your personalized emails. For example, let’s say you’re using a spreadsheet with these columns:
FirstName LastName Email
Some of the FirstName values are blank. So for those, you want GMass to auto detect the first name. And in cases where GMass cannot auto detect the first name, you want to use “old friend”. In that case, the syntax would look like:
Hi {FirstName|auto-first|old friend}:
The personalization tokens are tried in the order they are placed inside the curly brackets. Fallback values should be separated by the pipe symbol ( | ).
Conditional Content
As of December 2020, you can use If/Then and other statements in your Subject and Message to hyper personalize content based on any criteria you have associated with each email address. Read our full guide on conditional content for personalized emails.
Advanced Personalization:
How to Personalize an Email in Gmail with the Recipient’s Name, Image, Attachments, and More
Along with the techniques above, you can also:
Personalize links and URLs for each recipient, including anchor links, and avoid link breakage that can otherwise occur in the Compose window.
Personalize attachments by sending individual images, invoices, or documents to each recipient in a mass email.
Personalize images for each recipient to include a different team logo, pet breed, or astrological sign, etc.
Personalize large blocks of text according to the needs of each recipient, such as a different promotional offer for different levels of customers, or for customers in different zip codes.
Send your campaign to a personalized CC or BCC address for each recipient to keep the associated salesperson or distributor in the loop according to their respective territories or accounts.
Personalize the To header of each individual email so that your contact’s First and Last name appear as part of the To line instead of just their email address.
Testing Personalization
We’ve attempted to make our personalization tools as dummy-proof as possible, but it’s always a good idea to test your Gmail mail merge personalization before sending your actual campaign.
It’s easy to make sure your personalization is working before you send your email to all of your recipients. You can use the Send Test button along with the Create Drafts setting to easily see what personalization to anyone on your list will look like.
The easiest way to test your mail merge personalization is to set your campaign to Create Drafts and then use the “Send Test” button.
When you do this, DRAFTS will be created for each address you put in the test address box. This won’t send any test emails. So even if you don’t own the addresses, you can still see what the email will look like to anyone on your list when you eventually send your personalized mass emails. Just click the “Send Test” button and check your Gmail DRAFTS folder. When you’re ready to actually send your campaign with the red GMass button, don’t forget to switch the Action back to “Send email”.
Also note that:
GMass will pop-up a warning if you use merge tags in your campaign that aren’t actually a part of your campaign.
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You can now automatically detect a person’s first name just from their email address, and then use that name to personalize your email campaign. This is a world’s first for email marketers using Gmail as their email marketing platform.
The algorithm works purely by analyzing of the email address characters and doesn’t query any APIs that provide demographic data on email addresses.
I ran my test on an actual campaign to my users announcing a couple new features (but not this feature). Here’s a screen shot from my Sent folder of my own Gmail account:
The green rows indicate rows where the first name was correctly determined, while the red ones indicate an incorrect guess
As the above screen shot shows, the algorithm guessed the recipient’s first name in most cases. Only 5 out of this sampling of 50 produced an incorrect guess, and the unmarked rows are ones where the first name was impossible to guess because it wasn’t present in the email address.
How do you use it?
Just insert the personalization variable {auto-first} anywhere in your Subject or Message, and GMass will insert the recipient’s first name, based on the recipient’s email address.
Note that first name detection algorithm isn’t perfect — it works in approximately 90% of cases, and can only work if the actual first name is present in the local part of the email address (the part before the @ sign).
Because it’s not 100% perfect, it is not recommended that you use the {auto-first} personalization tag as a standalone personalization technique. Instead you should:
Set a fallback value to use with {auto-first}. For example, use {auto-first|Customer}. That way, if GMass detects the first name, it will be used. If it can’t detect the first name, the fallback value of “Customer” will be used.
As a further protective mechanism, and because even when the first name is present in an email address, GMass might not always choose the exact first name, use the “Just create Drafts” feature to preview each individual email first, before sending. That way, you can spot check the Drafts to make sure that the first names were generated properly before sending.
Fallback Values
In our Complete Guide to Personalization, you’ll learn how to set two fallback values. Let’s say you’re connecting to a spreadsheet with the columns: First, Last, Email. And let’s say some of the values for “First” are blank. So in these cases, you want GMass to auto-detect the first name. But then let’s say that GMass is unable to auto-detect the first name in a few of these cases. You can set two fallback values using this syntax:
Hi there {FirstName|auto-first|old friend}
An example where the auto detected first name is a fallback value to the spreadsheet column “FirstName.” The words “old friend” are the fallback value to the auto detected first name.
The first name auto-detection feature isn’t part of the GMass interface yet, so you won’t find a button in the Settings Panel to insert the {auto-first} designation. You have to type it or copy/paste from this post manually into your Subject or Message. In this case, if “FirstName” has a value in your spreadsheet, it’s used. If not, GMass will attempt to auto-detect the first name. If GMass can’t auto detect the first name, then the text “old friend” will be inserted.
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Now we have written a hack so that you can save your signature with GMass and so that your signature shows up every time a Compose window is launched, even if launched by GMass.
Saving your signature to GMass is easy.
Hit Compose to launch a new blank Compose window with just your signature.
In the To field, put “[email protected]”. The Subject can be anything.
Then hit the GMass button to send it.
Compose a blank email, with just your signature, and send to [email protected] with the GMass button (not the Send button). This will save your signature with GMass.
That’s all there is to it! An email will have been sent to [email protected], and your signature is now saved with GMass. Any time you use a GMass feature to launch a Compose window, including “Connect to Google Sheets”, “Build an Email List from Search Results”, or “Send a Manual Follow-up Campaign” (the three red buttons near the Search field), the Compose window will contain your signature!
See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass
Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge all in one tool — that works inside Gmail
