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I’m going to walk you through how to set up DKIM in this article, and it’s not going to take too long.

Even if you don’t really know what DKIM is.

In this guide, I’ll take you through the entire DKIM setup process, including:

  • Generating your DKIM key
  • Setting up DKIM for your domain
  • Testing to make sure everything worked

And we should be able to do this in less than five minutes (assuming you know all your account passwords, which is the part that always slows me down).

Do note: This guide is written for GMass users who are sending through a Google Workspace account. If you’re a GMass user sending through an external SMTP server (usually to break Gmail’s limits), there are special settings for you which we’ll cover here as well.

How to Set Up DKIM: Table of Contents

What Is DKIM in Under 100 Words?

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a digital signature attached to your emails which allows a mail server to determine if that email was authorized for your domain.

For example, if a spammer spoofs your domain and sends messages from an unauthorized server, they would fail DKIM authentication. A recipient’s mail server could/should then send the message to spam or not deliver it at all.

That’s why having DKIM set up for your domain can be good for your deliverability — it helps prove you are who you say you are.

How do SPF and DMARC relate to DKIM?

DKIM is one of the three primary email authentication methods. The others are:

  • Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
  • Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

SPF, like DKIM, is a domain record which mail servers use to determine whether a sender using your domain was authorized to do so.

DMARC is a different type of record. It’s a policy you create that works with SPF and/or DKIM. The DMARC record shares whether your emails are using SPF and/or DKIM as authentication methods, and lets a mail server know what to do with messages that fail those methods.

Do I need to set up DKIM?

As of February 1st, 2024, Google and Yahoo/AOL’s new sender policies require anyone who sends using their own domain name (e.g., [email protected]) to have either a SPF or DKIM record in place.

So you do need to set up DKIM or SPF.

If you’re a bulk sender — defined as sending 5,000+ emails per day to gmail.com addresses or a “significant volume” to Yahoo/AOL addresses — you need to have both SPF and DKIM records. You’ll also need DMARC in place.

I heard Google will use a default DKIM key if I don’t have one set up… so do I still need to do any of this?

You heard right. If you’re using Google Workspace, Google will automatically sign your message with its default DKIM key, d=*gappssmtp.com.

The good news: If you don’t go through the steps in this article, you’ll still pass DKIM.

But… if you want to use DMARC authentication to boost your deliverability, then we recommend you still go through the process of setting up your own DKIM key. That way you can hit DKIM alignment.

And as I’ll keep saying through this article, if you’re going to use a third-party SMTP service to send messages through Gmail with GMass, follow these instructions to set up DKIM the right way for that scenario.

Will having a DKIM record help deliverability?

Having DKIM in place can help with deliverability — that is, it helps your emails reach the inbox, not the spam folder.

Google says so, point blank: “Without DKIM, messages sent from your organization or domain are more likely to be marked as spam by receiving mail servers.”

DKIM alone does not, however, guarantee every email you send will reach the inbox.

There are lots of factors that go into deliverability, ranging from your sender reputation to the contents of your email to whether recipients in the past have engaged with your messages. That being said, having DKIM and the other authentication methods set up is absolutely a piece of the deliverability puzzle.

Do I need to set up DKIM if I have a gmail.com email address?

You cannot set up DKIM if you have a gmail.com address — because you can’t.

Setting up DKIM (or SPF, or DMARC) requires you to create a DNS record for your domain. (Again, don’t worry, I’ll show you how to do that later in this article.)

You can’t create DNS records for the gmail.com domain because, of course, that’s Google’s. And they already have SPF and DKIM set up.

So if you’re sending from a gmail.com account, you’re all set. There’s no need for you to do anything in this article.

What do I do if I don’t control my own domain name?

It’s possible that you don’t control your own domain name. For example: Maybe you work for a company and send emails through them.

In those cases, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get into the DNS records yourself to set up your DKIM record.

So you’ll need to talk to whoever’s in charge — your boss, the IT department, or someone else — to explain that DKIM is important and they need to set up the record so your emails will be in compliance with Google and Yahoo’s sender requirements.

Step 1: Getting Your DKIM Key

Note: If you use GMass with a third-party SMTP server, follow these instructions instead.

First up, let’s check to see if you already have a DKIM record in place. If so, you won’t have to do any of this.

How to check if you have a DKIM record

You can use GMass’s free email analyzer tool to figure out whether you already have DKIM set up for your domain.

Head over to the tool, then grab the email address it gives you.

Send an email to that address from your email account.

Once GMass processes the email (should take a few seconds), the screen will show you all the technical details of your email. The Headers tab will let you know the DKIM information.

Finding DKIM in the email analyzer

If you have a valid record, and you’ve never set one up, odds are it’s Google’s default DKIM record.

Still, it’s smart to still set up your own, especially for deliverability purposes (and if you plan to also set up DMARC and achieve DKIM alignment).

Also note: You can have multiple DKIM signatures, perhaps set through Google Workspace and another with an SMTP provider.

Creating a DKIM record

Again: If you use GMass with a third-party SMTP server, follow these instructions instead.

The first step to creating a DKIM record is getting your key from the Google Admin console. You’ll need to be logged into the domain as a super administrator; if someone else owns or controls the domain, they’ll need to go through this process.

But assuming you are the top level administrator, go to the Google Admin console, then go to Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail.

Where to find the Gmail settings in Google Admin

Click Gmail, then scroll down to Authenticate email and click.

Go into the authenticate email section

Select the domain you’re authenticating from the dropdown. Then click Generate New Record.

In the selection box, choose your settings. Most modern domain providers will take 2048-bit keys, so choose that. And while you could set your own prefix, going with their default of google follows their recommendations. Then click Generate.

Generating a DKIM record

Google will give you a DNS Host name and TXT record value. Keep this window open, because you’ll need those for our next step.

Step 2: Adding Your DKIM Record to Your Domain

Now that you’ve generated your DKIM key, you’re ready to add it to your domain.

As a beginner, odds are you’re going to enter it at your domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap, and so on). You should start there, anyway; they’ll let you know if they’re not actually managing your Domain Name System (DNS) settings.

If you’re using a web host, it’s possible they are handing DNS for your domain. If you try to add the DNS record at your registrar and they say someone else is managing it, head over to your web host. (Their support can also help you with this as needed.)

As a beginner, it’s unlikely there’s a different third-party managing your DNS settings.

How to input a DKIM record at your domain registrar

I’ll show you an example of DNS management here with GoDaddy. While your registrar won’t look exactly like this, the basic concept is the same (go to your domain, go to its DNS settings, add a record).

Log into your domain registrar, then find your domain. Enter the DNS management settings for that domain. Then click whatever link or button you see to add a new record.

Adding a new DNS record at your registrar

Now you’ll enter the following things:

  • Type: TXT
  • Name/Host:  The DNS Host name (TXT record name) from Google
  • Value: The TXT record value from Google
  • Time-to-Live (TTL): 1 hour or 3600 seconds

Then save your new record.

How to add a DKIM record

You can scroll through the list of DNS records at your registrar. You’ll find your new TXT record there.

Step 3: Authenticating and Verifying Your DKIM Record

Now that you’ve created your DKIM record… it’s time to wait.

It can take up to 48 hours for DNS changes to propagate through the internet. In my experience, they don’t usually take that long, but they do take some time. I usually try in about four hours, then eight hours, then if it’s still not working, the following day.

Eventually, though, you’ll be able to run Google’s authentication.

Authenticating in Google Admin

Go back to the Authenticate email section of the Google Admin console and click the Start Authentication button.

Start the DKIM authentication

If you’ve waited long enough (and no one ever waits long enough the first time, don’t feel bad) into the 48-hour period, you should get a success message.

You can then double-check DKIM using GMass’s email analyzer, like you did in step one.

If You’re Using a Third-Party SMTP Service with GMass

If you’re using a third-party SMTP service like Amazon SES, ReachMail, or even GMass’s own in-house option of SMTPGM, follow the instructions in this article to set up DKIM through GMass.

When you go through that process, GMass will be able to pass along your DKIM headers to your SMTP service (assuming it’s one that does not strip them out) and you’ll be able to pass DMARC.

How to Set Up DKIM: Next Steps

You have now successfully set up DKIM authentication for your domain.

With that, you are in compliance with Google and Yahoo’s requirements for all senders. (If you’re a bulk sender, you also need SPF and DMARC.)

And while you’re in your domain registrar editing DNS settings, we might as well set up a few more things to help your deliverability.

You can set up SPF even faster than setting up DKIM. And all it requires is adding another TXT record to your domain.

You should set up DMARC, since it works with your SPF/DKIM records and is a deliverability boost. Setting it up will also just take one more TXT record to your domain.

And finally, this is a great time to set up a custom tracking domain. A custom tracking domain replaces the shared domains for your open tracking, click tracking, and unsubscribe link — and it can be a major deliverability boost. Once again, all it will take is adding one more DNS record.

These are all smart ways to boost your deliverability — but there’s always more you can do, and we can help.

If you’re not a GMass user, join us — 99% of users report the best deliverability they’ve ever had.

It’s really simple to sign up for a free trial of GMass. Just download the Chrome extension and you’ll be ready to go. It works inside of your Gmail account so there’s no new software to learn, and you can send up to 50 emails per day during your free trial.

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


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A mail merge is a handy way to send personalized mass letters and bulk emails quickly (and if you’re looking for how to mail merge Word from Excel, you know the potential time-savings and power).

It works by automatically adding personalization data from a data file (for example, a spreadsheet) to a template file (like a letter or an email).

In this article, I’ll first cover what a mail merge is and explain how it works. Then, I’ll go over how to mail merge using an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document.

Later, I’ll mention two issues of using the traditional method for mail merges and running a mail merge from Excel to Word. I’ll also suggest a better and more powerful alternative to help you send mass emails.

Mail Merge Word from Excel: Table of Contents:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

Let’s jump right in.

What Are Mail Merges?

A mail merge lets you create personalized documents that are automatically customized on a recipient-by-recipient basis. This spares you the trouble of manually personalizing each document yourself!

You can use mail merges to create personalized messages automatically for:

  • Marketing emails.
  • Newsletters.
  • Custom catalogs.
  • Form letters, and more.

Note: A form letter is a template file used to create mass letters. Instead of typing a letter for each recipient, you can use a form letter to make quick, unique, personalized letters for each person. 

Essentially, if there’s a document you need to personalize at scale, mail merges can take care of it for you!

Go back to Contents

Let’s now explore how a mail merge works.

How Does Mail Merge Work?

First, you need to understand the two essential components of every mail merge.

They are:

  1. Template File: the document (Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or an email) that holds the message you’ll be sending out (like a letter or an email). It specifies the places where the personalization data will go. And that data (names, addresses, etc.) is fetched from a data file.
  2. Data File: a data source like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheets file. Each cell in the data file contains different information (first name, last name, email address, etc.) that will be placed in your template file in the corresponding space.

Essentially, a mail merge automatically adds the personalization data from your data file to your template file

For example, let’s say you want to perform a mail merge to create mass letters.
Here, your letter is the template file — it has placeholders for your contacts’ names and addresses.

Template file

Notice the «FirstName», «Address» and other tags in the letter?
These are placeholders for your recipient’s details, also known as mail merge fields.

A mail merge field draws the personalization information from your data file (spreadsheet) to help you create your personalized letter.

But to make this work, the name of the mail merge field in your personalized letter template must match the name of the column header in your spreadsheet.

Data file

If the name of the merge fields and column headers match, the mail merge function would then merge your data file and your letter template to generate a personalized letter for each person.

Go back to Contents

Next, I’ll go over the steps involved in using mail merge to automatically personalize individual letters.

How to Use Mail Merge to Send Bulk Letters

You can use the mail merge feature in Word and Excel to create auto-personalized individual letters quickly.

Here:

  • The mail merge template is a form letter in Microsoft Word.
  • The data file is an Excel spreadsheet containing your recipients’ details.

Let’s now explore the steps involved in using the merge feature for bulk letters:

Step 1: Create and format your address list in Microsoft Excel

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up an Excel data file:

Step A
Open MS Excel and click on Blank workbook to open a blank Excel workbook (or document).

Blank workbook

Note: If your contact data is readily available as an Excel spreadsheet, open the file and format it. If the data is present in a TXT or CSV file, go to Data From Text/CSV to open the file in Excel.

From text

Step B
Now you can start entering the details of your address list into the Excel workbook.
Only enter your column header names in the first row, starting in cell A1.

A1 cell

Check your header row to make sure the column headers in your Excel spreadsheet are exactly the same as the field names (or placeholder names) you want to use in your Word template document.

For example, if the column names in your Excel sheet are “FirstName”, “LastName”, and “Email”, the field names in your Microsoft Word document should also be “FirstName”, “LastName”, and “Email”.

Step C
Enter your contact information in your Excel database as one record per row, starting from cell A2.

Enter Contact information

Quick Tip
Data entries such as ZIP codes, percentages, currencies, etc., must be in the correct numeric format. To ensure this, you need to:

1. Select a column that has numeric data entries.

2. Go to the Home → Number section.

General- number

3. Click on the Number Format box and choose the correct format from the drop-down list that appears.

4. Repeat steps 1–3 for all columns containing numeric values.

Number format box

Step D
Once you’ve created the contact sheet, you can save your Excel document by pressing Ctrl+S or going to File → Save or File → Save As.

Bonus Tip for Gmail Users
If you’re creating your first mail merge data file, you can export all your existing Gmail contacts (or “Google Contacts”) to get started quickly. Read my guide on how to export contacts from Gmail to learn how.

Note: Ensure that you finish all edits to the Excel spreadsheet before starting the mail merge process. Making edits to an Excel sheet once you’ve already begun a mail merge is a complicated additional step.

Step 2: Create the main mail merge document in MS Word

The next step is to create the form letter (or mail merge template — your main document) in your Microsoft Word document. You can create a different mail merge template for every bulk email campaign, and you can save the templates for future use.

A favorite time-saving technique of mass email managers is to choose an old email template that worked well, update the content where necessary, and give the mail merge template a new name.

As a result, when you create your mail merge document, try writing it in a way that will let you adapt and reuse it in future bulk mailings.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a mail merge template in Microsoft Office Word:

Step A
Open a new document (blank document) in Word.

This is the main document for your mail merge.

Blank document

Step B
Click on the Mailings tab and select Start Mail Merge. A drop-down menu displaying every different mail merge document type will appear.

You can select the document type for letters, emails, envelopes, mailing labels, or a directory. Since we’re using the Word mail merge feature for sending letters, choose Letters as your merge document.

Letters

Step C (Optional)
You can also use the Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard (from the Start Mail Merge drop-down menu) to streamline the Word mail merge process.

The mail merge wizard lets you quickly select the starting mail merge document.

For example, it lets you use the current document, which is the mail merge letter you’re creating now. Or you could choose a starter template or another existing document as your mail merge template.

mail merge dropdown

Step D
Write the body of the letter.

Letter body

(Don’t worry about manually adding placeholders in your letter yet.)

Step 3: Select the recipient list

Now you can select the list of mail merge recipients (from your Excel file) who will receive your letter.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do this:

Step A
Click on the Select Recipients option in the Mailings tab. A drop-down menu appears, showing different mail merge list sources.

As your contact information is already available as an Excel file, click on Use an Existing List.

Use Existing list

Note: You can also include your Outlook Contacts list if you have Outlook connected to Word.

Step B
In the dialog box that pops up, select the Excel sheet you created earlier and click Open.

open button

Step C
A Select Table window appears. Choose the Excel worksheet you want to merge with the Word template and click OK.

Ok button

Note: If your Excel spreadsheet has only one worksheet, you’ll only see Sheet1 in the Select Table window.

Step D
If you want to edit your mail merge recipients list, click on the Edit Recipient List tab.

In the Mail Merge Recipients window that pops up, clear the checkbox of the person you don’t want in your mailing list.

Edit recipient list

Anyone you remove from your recipient list in this step will be removed from any mail merge project that uses this data file in the future.

Step 4: Add personalized messages

The next step is to add personalized content (like contact names and addresses) to your form letter template (Word mail merge document).

In Word, you can insert three personalization variables into your document:

  • Insert Address Block — add a recipient’s address to your document.
  • Insert Greeting Line — include a personalized greeting or salutation in your letter.
  • Insert Merge Field — insert other mail merge fields from your Excel file.

Here’s a walkthrough on how to add all three personalization variables to your merge document (form letter):

Note: You can add a personalization variable at an insertion point of your choice in the Word document. For example, to add a greeting line before the body of your letter, simply place the text cursor at the point you want to add it.

Insertion point

A. Insert an Address block

To insert a recipient’s address from your Excel worksheet, click on Address Block from the Write & Insert Fields section. In the window that appears, choose an address block format of your choice and click OK.

Address block

An address placeholder («AddressBlock») will be inserted automatically into your letter.

Address block placeholder

B. Insert a Greeting Line

To insert a greeting line, click on Greeting Line from the Write & Insert fields section.
In the dialog box that pops up, select the format you want to use and click OK.

Greeting line tab

A greeting placeholder («GreetingLine») will be automatically added to your document.

Greeting line placeholder

C. Insert Field

You can also add other mail merge fields, like your contact’s first name, company name, email id, etc., from your Excel worksheet to your Word template.

To do this, click on Insert Merge Field from the Write & Insert fields group.
You can see the insert field options there in the drop-down list of some mail merge labels. These labels are the column names in your Excel spreadsheet.

If you want to create a custom field, the easiest way is to add a column to your spreadsheet with the name of the custom field you want to make, like “birthday” or “pet name”. But you must do this before starting the mail merge process since you can’t edit your spreadsheet during mail merge.

Insert merge field

Click on the mail merge fields you want to add to your letter. Here’s how my form letter looks after inserting the placeholders (mail merge fields) I needed:

Form letter

Note: You can also use the Match Fields feature to manually match your Excel column fields with the Word placeholders. This way, you can ensure that all the mail merge fields are accurately mapped to your Excel column names.

match fields

Step 5: Preview and finish the mail merge process

After personalizing the form letter for each recipient, you can preview the letters to see how they look with the data inserted from your Excel worksheet.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do this:

Step A
Click on Preview Results under the Mailings tab.

Step B
To preview the result for each recipient, you can enter the recipient number (the corresponding row number in your Excel spreadsheet) in the text box.

For example, to preview the form letter for my second recipient — Brandon Walsh, I type “2” in the text box and click the Preview Results button.

Preview results

Note: You can also click on the Next and Previous buttons to quickly scroll through your mailing list to preview the letter for each person. 

If you realize someone who is scheduled to receive your bulk email should be removed from the recipient list, refer to Step 3 (D) for instructions.

Step C
After previewing the form letter, click on Finish & Merge to finish the Word mail merge process.

Finish and merge

From the drop-down list that appears, you can choose to:

  • Edit Individual Documents — if you want to edit each letter further, separately.
  • Print Documents — if you want to print documents (even as PDFs).
  • Send Email Messages — if you want to send the letters as emails.

Note: If you want to send the letters as email messages to a Gmail or Outlook contact, you must manually set up Gmail/Outlook with Word

Step 6: Save the form letter

After you’ve finished working with the merged document, you can save it by pressing the Ctrl+S keys or by going to the File menu and clicking Save or Save As.

You can also reuse the merged document for sending additional letters — just open it and click Yes when Word prompts you with this alert:

Word popup

Go back to Contents

How to Use Mail Merge to Send Mass Emails

You can use mail merge to quickly create personalized emails for newsletters, promos, and other email marketing messages.

Here, your mailing list is the data file, while the email is the mail merge template.

We’ve seen how to use Excel and Word to create personalized form letters.
Just follow the same steps to send merged emails to your mailing list.

However, I don’t recommend using Microsoft Word to send personalized emails at scale. Here’s why…

2 Problems of Using Microsoft Word to Send Mass Emails

While you can use a Microsoft Word document to create merged emails, there are two major drawbacks with this approach:

  • To send the merged document as an email message, you must manually set up Microsoft Outlook or Gmail with Word. This can be time-consuming and confusing for most users.
  • Microsoft Word isn’t well-equipped to handle mail merges. If your personalization tags are mismatched and there are hundreds of recipients or Outlook contacts (you can’t preview every email, can you?), you could end up sending something like this:

Wrong mail merge

Image Source: Twitter

Now, imagine sending hundreds of such embarrassing emails!

That’s why it’s smarter to use a dedicated mail merge feature tool like GMass to send mass emails.

How to Use Mail Merge with GMass to Send Mass Emails

Gmass

GMass is a powerful mail merge tool that lets you easily create and send tons of emails from your Gmail account.

Its advanced mail merge features have made it a popular tool used by employees from LinkedIn, Uber, Google, and Twitter. GMass is also perfect for individuals and groups like clubs, schools, churches, and other institutions to send emails to a target audience.

With GMass, you can easily create a mail merge with a data file stored as an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Import your Excel spreadsheet into Google Sheets

The first step is to import your Excel file into Sheets (this takes only a few seconds).

Why would you want to do this?
Because Google Sheets is far more powerful than Microsoft Excel for mail merging. Its automatic cloud-sync feature auto-saves your work with each edit made in the spreadsheet.

Plus, if you’re sending emails, it makes sense to have your spreadsheet online, right?

Additionally, Google Sheets is completely free and can be used by anyone with a Google (Gmail or Google Workspace) account. You won’t need a Microsoft Office subscription!

Note: If your data file is a CSV file, you can also import it into Google Sheets.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to import your Excel document into Google Sheets:

Note: I’ll be using the Excel sheet shown in the screenshot below for the walkthrough.

Enter Contact information

Step A
Open Google Sheets.

Open sheets

Step B
Select the folder icon to open the Google Sheets File Picker.

folder icon

Step C
In the window that appears, click on the Upload tab to import your Excel sheet.

Upload

Step D
You can now choose the file you want to import from your computer. To select the file, click on the Select a file from your device button.

Select a file

Step E
Choose the Excel file you want to import from your computer and click on the Open button.

Open button

Step F
Your file will be automatically imported as a new Google spreadsheet, which becomes your mail merge recipient list and data file.

Step 2: Format your Google Sheet

Your Google Sheet must be well-formatted before you use it with GMass. But don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as formatting your Excel spreadsheet.

Here are some guidelines to ensure it works well:

  • Your column names must be in plain text — they shouldn’t contain spaces, codes, or special characters.
  • Your column names must begin from cell A1. If there are any blank rows or additional text (like a sheet title) above the column names, you must delete them.
  • The actual personalization data must begin from the second row onward.
  • There must be at least one column that has your recipients’ email addresses.

GMass will auto-detect all column names during the mail merge process. It will automatically use the column labels in your Google Sheet as the placeholders in your email template.

Step 3: Install GMass and connect it to your Gmail account

If you haven’t installed the GMass Chrome extension yet, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to install and connect it to your Gmail account quickly:

Step A
Head to the Chrome Web Store page for GMass.

Step B
Click on the Add to Chrome button.

Add to chrome button

Step C
A dialog box pops up:

Gmass popup

Click on the Add extension button to add GMass to Chrome.

Step D
Log in to the Gmail account you want to use with GMass.

After logging in, you can see three new GMass buttons next to your Gmail search box.

Three icons

Click on one of these buttons, and you’ll be prompted to link your Gmail account to GMass:

gmass prompt

Click on the Connect GMass Now! button to connect your Gmail account with GMass.

Note: Simply installing the GMass extension doesn’t create a GMass account. It only makes the buttons appear in your Gmail account. You have to link it to your Gmail account (as above) to activate it.

Step 4: Connect your Google Sheet to GMass

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to perform this last step:

Step A
Open your Gmail account and click on the GMass spreadsheet button near your Gmail search box.

gmass spreadsheet icon

Step B
A dialog window appears:

Connect to spreadsheet

Step C
You can now use the drop-down menu to choose the Google sheet you want to use for the mail merge.

Choose a spreadsheet

Note: If you have only one sheet (Sheet1) in your Google spreadsheet, that sheet gets chosen by default. However, if your spreadsheet has multiple sheets, you can select the sheet you want from the drop-down list. 

Once you’ve chosen a spreadsheet, click on the CONNECT TO SPREADSHEET button.

Step D
Now, GMass will auto-read all your recipients’ data from your Google sheet. It will also automatically insert their email addresses in the To field of a new email.

Note: GMass replaces the list of individual email addresses with a single alias address

New message tab

However, you can choose to display the email addresses individually. This way, you’ll be able to see the email IDs of everyone on your recipient list — but don’t worry, each select recipient will see only their email address (just like when you add recipients to the BCC field).

BCC field

Step E
After a new email window appears, you can compose your email with GMass’ powerful personalization features. To use these personalization settings, click on the settings arrow near the GMass button.

Gmass icon arrow

Click on the Personalize drop-down list button to see all the column names present in your Google sheet.

Column names

To personalize your email, select the column labels from the drop-down list. You can add these placeholders anywhere in your email message and subject line.

Here’s how my personalized email looks like with placeholders:

Personalized email

Notice the {FirstName} variable?
That’s a personalization label corresponding to the column header FirstName in my Google Sheet.

Step F
After composing your email, click on the GMass button to send it to all your recipients.

Note: GMass will auto-personalize the email for each person based on the mail merge labels you’ve used in your message. 

For example, the third recipient of my email, Ron Carey, will receive an email that starts with “Dear Ron,” as the {FirstName} variable was used in the email message.

Go back to Contents

Mail Merge Word from Excel: Final Thoughts

Mail merging isn’t rocket science.

While you can use Microsoft Word to perform mail merges for letters, you need to follow a large number of steps correctly. Additionally, for sending mass emails, you have to set up a webmail client with Word manually.

Instead, why not use a powerful mail merge tool like GMass for sending mass emails?

Its advanced mass mailing features help you to perform mail merges and send out bulk emails effortlessly.

Why not try GMass today and simplify your mail merge experience?

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass


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It’s hard to believe that in 2024, GMass will turn nine years old. More than 1.5 million people have used GMass to send 6.5 billion emails as we’ve grown from a simple mail merge tool I created during a vacation in Hawaii to one of the most robust (and best reviewed!) email platforms on the planet.

To sustain that pace and to continue to be able to build, innovate, and grow for every one of our customers, the GMass subscription prices and plans will be changing on January 1st, 2024.

I hope you’ve loved and gotten great use out of all the new investments we’ve made with GMass. In just 2023 alone we launched The Reply Project, delivery routes, our own SMTP server, instant reply and bounce detection, triggered emails, MultiSend inbox rotation, and dozens of other features and improvements along the way.

Over the nine years of GMass we’ve added thousands of features, many of which were never-before-seen in the world of email sending.

I know no one loves paying a higher subscription price, and I held off as long as I could — even as the cost of everything else, including labor and every single one of our vendors and services, skyrocketed for the past two years. However, in order to keep GMass going and thriving with better service and more great new features, I’ve made the decision to adjust our pricing.

This is only the second time in the history of GMass I’ve needed to raise prices, and this increase is smaller than our last one.

Plus, even with these price adjustments, I made sure GMass is still priced far more affordably than any competitor in the market.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new plans.

Changes to GMass’s Pricing and Plans

Free plan

GMass will no longer offer new signups to the free plan as of December 14th, 2023. And all free plans will end on December 21st, 2023.

Instead of a free plan, new users will have access to a 7-day free trial where you can send up to 50 emails per day.

The team and I ran an extensive internal review of the free plan this year and, sadly, found it has led to too much fraud, abuse, resource strain, and support load. The consequences were an unsustainable negative effect on GMass’s paying customers, systems, and team.

Standard plan

The price of the Standard plan will go from 19.95/month to 25/month on the monthly plan.

If you subscribe to the annual plan, the price will go from 16.58/month (199 total) to 18.75/month (225 total).

As we noted when we first announced GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation, that feature will no longer be available in the Standard plan when these new plans take effect.

However, as a thank you to our current subscribers, anyone on the Standard plan before January 1st, 2024, will be grandfathered into MultiSend access for as long as you keep your plan active (or switch to annual).

In addition, triggered emails will no longer be available in the Standard plan once these new plans take effect. However, as another thank you, any current Standard plan customers will be grandfathered into triggered email access for the life of your subscription.

You can also lock in the current price for the next year by switching to an annual plan before January 1st, 2024.

Premium plan

The price of the Premium plan will go from 29.95/month to 35/month on the monthly plan.

If you subscribe to the annual plan, the price will go from 24.92/month (299 total) to 27.08/month (325 total).

When the plans change, GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation will move only to the top-tier Professional plan. But as a thank you to current Premium customers, anyone on a Premium plan before December 22nd, 2023 will be grandfathered into MultiSend access as long as you maintain your subscription (or switch it to annual).

You can also lock in the current price for the next year by switching to an annual plan before January 1st, 2024.

Professional plan (formerly called Enterprise)

The Enterprise plan is changing names to the Professional plan to better reflect the majority of emailers it serves.

The price of the Professional (née Enterprise) plan will go from 49.95/month to 55/month on the monthly plan. If you subscribe to the annual plan, the price will go from 41.58/month (499 total) to 43.75/month (525 total).

The Professional plan will still be on the only individual plan with high-priority support. Plus the Professional plan will be the only one with GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation. In addition, other upcoming features for sales pros will only come to this plan.

You can also lock in the current price for the next year by switching to an annual plan before January 1st, 2024.

Team plans

Team plans are having similar adjustments to the individual plans.

The features included in the Team plan are now an exact comp to the individual Professional plan. All users on Team plans will have access to all the features of the top-tier Professional plan, including high-priority support, GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation, and any upcoming features for sales pros.

Plan Old pricing New Pricing Per-user overage Savings vs. Professional plan
Team 5-user 25/ user/ month monthly (125 total)

-or-

20.83/ user/ month annually (1250 total)

29/ user/ month monthly (145 total)

-or-

24.17 user/ month annually (1450 total)

33/ user/ month 26/ user/ month monthly
Team 10-user 22.50/ user/ month monthly (225 total)

-or-

18.75/ user/ month annually (2250 total)

26.50/ user/ month monthly (265 total)

-or-

22.08/ user/ month annually (2650 total)

30/ user/ month 28.50/ user/ month monthly
Team 25-user 20/ user/ month monthly (500 total)

-or-

16.50/ user/ month annually (4950 total)

24/ user/ month monthly (600 total)

-or-

20/ user/ month annually (6000 total)

24/ user/ month 31/ user/ month monthly
Team 50-user 18/ user/ month monthly (900 total)

-or-

14.91/ user/ month annually (8950 total)

22/ user/ month monthly (1100 total)

-or-

18.33/ user/ month annually (11000 total)

22/ user/ month 33/ user/ month monthly
Team 100-user 15/ user/ month monthly (1500 total)

-or-

12.45/ user/ month annually (14950 total)

18/ user/ month monthly (1800 total)

-or-

14.95/ user/ month annually (17950 total)

19/ user/ month 36/ user/ month monthly

You can also lock in the current price for the next year by switching to an annual plan before January 1st, 2024.

Legacy plans

If you’re one of the small number of GMass subscribers still on a legacy pricing plan, check the email you receive from us for details.

Usage-based billing for SMTP

For the small number of GMass users who send emails (and, in particular, huge volumes of emails) via a third-party SMTP service, the pricing will remain the same.

The first 10,000 emails you send via an SMTP service are free. After that, the price is 40 cents per 1,000 emails sent through the SMTP service.

Non-profit discount

Nonprofits will still receive a 15% discount on subscriptions with the new pricing. That discount is applied automatically to accounts with a .org or .edu email address.

Next Steps for You

Again, if you switch to an annual plan before January 1st, 2024, you can lock in the current annual pricing for the next 12 months.

If you’d like to make any changes to your plan, you can do so by logging into your GMass dashboard.

If you have any questions about these changes, please reply to the individual email you receive from me about your plan.

Otherwise, there’s no action required on your part. Your plan price will increase automatically on January 1st, 2024.

We have huge plans for 2024 with new features and improvements to help you send high-deliverability, high-performing campaigns quicker and easier than ever before.

Thank you for being such a loyal GMass customer and I hope 2024 is your most successful year yet.

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


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GMass has always immediately detected when your prospects open and/or click your messages — and now, GMass also immediately detects when you receive a reply or when one of your messages bounce!

Instant reply detection in action

In the past, it took a few hours for GMass to process replies and bounces due to the sheer number of accounts in our system (when you’ve got 1,000,000+ people using your email platform, that’s a whole lot of accounts to process).

But we re-engineered the entire process to make the process at least 99.999537% faster — going from a few hours to less than a few seconds.

In fact, based on our tests, that means GMass now has the fastest reply and bounce detection of any email outreach platform!

Why Instant Reply/Bounce Detection Is Valuable for You

Here’s why instant detection of replies and bounces will help you create, send, and manage your campaigns even better than before.

Up-to-the-second accurate reports

No more waiting for your reports to catch up to the emails you’re seeing in your inbox.

With instant reply and bounce detection, your GMass reports now show you exactly where your campaign stands every time you check them.

Web-based reports updated immediately

If you’re using GMass’s shareable web-based report, your teammates, bosses, and clients will see the most accurate numbers possible — meaning you won’t have to tell them, “I promise we got replies, just wait for the report to update.”

Good for auto follow-up sequences

With auto follow-up sequences in GMass, you can set your follow-up messages to stop when a recipient opens, clicks, replies, or either clicks or replies.

Good for auto follow-ups that stop on reply

With slower reply detection, we heard some concern around auto follow-ups going out to prospects whose replies were not yet detected. GMass actually would scan your account for replies right before sending an auto follow-up batch… but if you didn’t know that, it could cause concern.

Now that’s something you don’t have to worry about. With instant replies, you won’t have to worry about GMass not noticing replies — even if they reply just moments before the auto follow-up is scheduled.

Good for A/B testing

Want to run an A/B test on your GMass campaign and choose your winning variation (or have GMass automatically pick the winner) based on the number of replies?

Good for A/B tests that measure by replies

With instant reply detection, now you can feel confident using a shorter A/B testing time window if you’re judging on replies. And you can also be sure every reply you see in your inbox will count toward the final verdict — even replies that come in right before the decision.

Good for blazing through responses to interested prospects with The Reply Project

The Reply Project is GMass’s tool for getting through responding to emails in record time. And it’s baked into GMass to help you blaze through replying to the responses to your campaign.

Now when you click on the Replies number in your reports and launch The Reply Project to send responses, you’ll see every reply without the delays.

Then The Reply Project will open up each reply and you can either type in a message or use templates or ChatGPT for even faster responses.

Good for teams who use shared bounces

GMass’s global bounce feature lets teams “share” bounce lists (both everyone using the same Google Workspace domain and everyone on your GMass team plan).

When you have global bounces enabled, GMass will automatically suppress any emails you try to send to addresses on any of your teammates’ bounce lists.

Good for teams sharing global bounces

With instant bounce detection, you can be confident your bounce lists are up-to-the-second accurate — eliminating the risk of anyone on your team sending to an address that already bounced for another teammate.

Opens up more AMAZING upcoming features

Instant reply detection opens the door for some highly-requested features that will help GMass become an even faster, more efficient, and more effective way to run your campaigns.

Look for things like reply automation, spreading campaigns across multiple accounts, and more — they’re coming soon, and they’re all thanks to instant reply detection.

Why Building Instant Reply/Bounce Detection Was the Biggest Technical Challenge Since GMass Launched

So… it turns out that detecting instant replies and bounces for the 1,000,000+ accounts using GMass was a little bit challenging.

And by that, I mean it was the most technically-challenging project I’ve encountered in the eight years since I built GMass.

I tweeted about the process here if you’re curious about all that went into this…

Getting Instant Reply/Bounce Detection in Your GMass Account

Good news: If you’re a GMass user, you automatically have instant reply and bounce notifications active in your account — no action needed on your end.

If you’re not a GMass user yet, you can try GMass for free (and yes, instant reply and bounce detection is active for free users). Get started by downloading the Chrome extension — no credit card required — and you’ll be sending campaigns in a matter of minutes.

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews


Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.


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Cold email affiliate marketing is a spectacular way to make more sales — and they’re lucrative sales, since generally your cold emails will generally promote high-paying software products with recurring revenue.

But… affiliate marketing with cold email is really hard for most people to do.

It doesn’t have to be.

In this article:

  • I’ll cover the four big things you need to know before you start promoting affiliate offers with cold email.
  • I’ll share five strategies for a successful affiliate outreach campaign — tips I’ve gotten from experts themselves.
  • I’ll also share five sample templates you can adapt for your affiliate email marketing campaigns.
  • And finally, I’ll show you how to set up your campaigns in GMass so you can send personalized cold email outreach at scale.

Quick plug! GMass has a fantastic affiliate program. Get extremely high recurring payments (50% year one for individual plans, 20% of years two and three) with instant approval into the program.

And you can use all the techniques in this article, since we allow for cold emailing promotions.

Cold Email Affiliate Marketing: Table of Contents

What Is Cold Emailing for Affiliate Marketers?

Cold email for affiliate marketers is outreach to a potential customer who would have an interest in purchasing the affiliate product you’re promoting.

It’s “cold” because you don’t have a prior relationship with the people you’re contacting. Much like cold calling, you’re reaching out to targeted prospects who have a clear need for what you’re promoting.

Cold emails are not spam emails when you’re sending a personalized and relevant message to each prospect.

4 Essential Things You Need to Know Before You Promote Affiliate Products in an Cold Email Campaign

1. If you’re a cold email veteran, promoting affiliate products is different than what you’re used to

The vast majority of cold outreach pros are promoting their own product (or their own company’s product) or service. Cold emailers understand how to do that.

Promoting a third-party product? That requires a whole different approach.

One that catches cold emailers totally off guard.

As you’ll see in the tips below, a cold affiliate promotion can be confusing to recipients — why are you sending an email trying to get them to buy someone else’s product? It’s suspicious.

So your cold email template will need to address that elephant in the room (on top of all the other things a cold outreach message needs to do).

Also, I know lots of cold emailers are terrified of including links in messages out of email deliverability concerns. In this situation, you’ll need to include your affiliate link — so brace yourself.

2. If you’re an affiliate marketer, promoting via cold outreach is different than what you’re used to

You may be a master of promoting via blog posts, social media, YouTube videos, or even a traditional opt-in email marketing campaign.

Cold email is different. You’re sending a succinct, unannounced sales email where you have about 150 words or less to convince someone to buy someone else’s product based on the recommendation from you, a stranger.

Oh, and it needs to feel like a personalized email not just a mass email or generic marketing automation.

You’ll need a whole new bag of tricks and techniques here.

3. You need to make sure the affiliate program you’re promoting allows for cold email

Not every company wants you promoting their product or service through an outreach campaign.

Amazon, which is the world’s most popular affiliate partner program, famously doesn’t allow you to put an affiliate link in email — cold or from an opt-in email list.

Plenty of other programs have similar rules; make sure you aren’t running afoul of a program’s rules with your affiliate marketing cold email.

Note: The GMass affiliate program is one that allows for you to sell via cold email. (But NOT spam.)

4. Cold affiliate outreach needs to be B2B only

As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible for your cold campaign to cross a line — and get swept up by the spam filters — if you’re not really speaking to an engaged, receptive target audience.

Doing B2C cold affiliate marketing can get you in trouble; B2B is a much safer bet from a legal perspective. (I’m not a lawyer, though — make sure you understand local laws and consult your own attorney before you get started.)

Alright.

Now that we’ve covered all that, let’s talk strategy.

Here are the tips I’ve learned from my own experiences and from talking to experts who have found success in promoting an affiliate offer via a cold email campaign.

I’ve also included a sample cold email template with each strategy — make sure to adapt these to make them your own and don’t use them word-for-word.

Strategy #1. Be clear and honest about your relationship to your offer

Who are you and why are you promoting someone else’s product or software? It doesn’t make sense on the surface.

Though many cold emailers have lost this thread, at its core, effective cold email marketing is about establishing a genuine, honest, personal business relationship with your recipient.

And in the affiliate situation, you need to be honest and clear: You’re not promoting this software out of the kindness of your heart.

Make sure to pick the right language. You don’t need to say, “I’m an affiliate marketer.” Use better language like “I’m a partner” or “My job is matching up companies with software that’s a perfect fit.”

When you lay your cards on the table, you disarm your prospect because it no longer looks like you’re trying to fool them.

You’re making it clear you’re selling something — and then, as we’ll cover, you’ll establish why you’re selling it and why they should buy it from you.

Sample affiliate email marketing template focusing on honesty about who you are

Hi {FirstName|auto-first|there}!

I saw {BusinessName} is having everyone return to the office… which isn’t always the most popular decision.

One way to make that transition a little happier: Make your staff even more comfortable than they were at home.

I’m a partner for Steelbeam, which makes the most comfortable (yet affordable!) office chairs ever. I would know. I only decided to start promoting their chairs after I bought one… and never wanted to stand up.

You can check out their chairs on the Steelbeam website. I recommend the Steel Jump. I’m sitting on it as I write this to you right now!

Jeff Smith

Partner, Steelbeam Chairs

Cold email affiliate marketing template 1

Setting this up in GMass

The email above is pretty basic, so it’s not going to take much to set it up in GMass.

You’ll want to create a Google Sheet of prospects with columns for their email addresses, first names, and business names — that way you can do a Google Sheets mail merge.

Make a Google Sheet with prospects

(Don’t worry if you can’t find their first names. I used GMass’s auto-first option in my template, which automatically tried to detect a prospect’s name from their email. I also have the fallback of “there” in case you don’t have the first name and GMass can’t detect one.)

Connect your Google Sheet to a new GMass campaign.

Write up your template using the mail merge tags. You can always reference the mail merge options from your Google Sheet by typing a left curly brace.

Use a left curly brace to bring up mail merge options

And once the email is all done, you can send it by pressing the GMass button.

Strategy #2. Find potential customers who are using expensive/flawed competitors

It’s tough to break product loyalty. Even if someone isn’t enamored of a product, the process of switching to something new feels like work.

However, if you can make a compelling case why someone should switch products, you just might be able to get them interested in making the leap.

This is another case where you need to make it clear in your marketing email who you are and why you’re advocating for the product.

It’s also helpful to have a few killer stats that demonstrate the difference between your prospect’s current product and the one you’re selling.

You should get creative with your prospecting to find people using competitor products.

If you’re selling anything website-related, BuiltWith is a great way to find who’s using competitors’ tech. You can also run searches on reviews, job postings, and social media to source more candidates who could be interested in switching.

Sample affiliate email marketing template to prospects using a competitor

Hello!

I was watching one of your YouTube videos today (the one about {YouTubeTopic}) and I noticed your audio had some static and muffling.

I’m guessing you haven’t upgraded mics because good ones get really expensive.

You should check out the lavalier mic pack from AudioWiz. (Yes, I work as a partner for them — but I promise they’re the best. Which is actually why I decided to start working with them.)

It should improve your sound quality significantly — and it’s a fraction of the price of the $1,000+ pro mics you’ve probably seen.

Let me know if you have any questions about them and I can help you out.

Jeff Smith

Audiophile and Partner, AudioWiz

Cold email for affiliate marketing template 2

Setting this up in GMass

There’s nothing too complicated about setting up this email in GMass — it’s a straightforward mail merge. You would need a column of conversational descriptions of YouTube videos in your Google Sheet — that element makes this feel much more personal than linking to a video.

This email is a great situation for auto follow-ups that continue until someone clicks or replies.

You can set up your automated follow-up messages in the GMass settings. And choose to keep sending if No Click or Reply.

Using no reply or click

The goal with these follow-ups is to continue breaking down the “five common sales objections” — since getting someone to switch from their current product to a new one is fertile ground for objections.

Strategy #3. Demonstrate your expertise on the affiliate product and connect it to your prospect

These next three strategies all focus on the biggest remaining sticking points of cold email outreach:

  • Why should they buy from YOU and not just go to the company’s website directly without you?
  • Why are YOU promoting this product beyond just wanting a commission — what makes you the right person to connect their business with this product?

So as you put together your outreach message, you need to show you’ve considered the needs of your prospect and specifically addressed them with the product you’re promoting.

How can you demonstrate your expertise and tie it back to your prospect?

Case studies are always incredibly powerful in cold email. Do you have a case study where you helped a similar company? If so, share it.

Do you have a website or social media where you do product reviews or evaluations to show your expertise in the product niche? Point to that… then explain why the particular product you’re promoting is a good fit for this specific company.

Do you have other credible social proof you can show off? How many customers have you worked with? Do you have testimonials? What can you share that shows off your experience?

Or… were you once in the prospect’s shoes and now life is better thanks to the product you’re selling? In that case, you can tell a first-person story and use yourself as the case study.

What if you don’t have any case studies or track record? Hope is not lost! You could put together a demo (or screenshot) connecting the company to the product. This takes more time and effort — but when you don’t have a track record, you will have to work a bit harder.

You can also use the other two strategies I’ll cover next in this article — they use enhanced offers to offset a lack of social proof.

Sample cold email template for affiliate marketing by product experts

Hello!

I got your newsletter today (the one about {NewsletterTopic} and, unfortunately… it went to my spam folder.

That shouldn’t happen.

And I know it… because it used to happen to me.

I switched to GMass about a year ago and since then, my deliverability has been incredible — and my open and click rates are almost double what they used to be.

They have all sorts of genius ways they help with deliverability, plus it’s the easiest email marketing platform to switch to since it actually works inside Gmail.

It’s been so good I decided to become a sales partner, so I could reach out to more places like {CompanyName}.

You should definitely check out what makes GMass different (and have a look at that deliverability section)!

Let me know if you have any questions about it as well and I’d be happy to help you out.

Jeff Smith

(And yes, I sent this email with GMass.)

Affiliate marketing for cold email template 3

Setting this up in GMass

When you send a message that talks about hitting the inbox… you’d better hit the inbox. (And even if your cold emails aren’t about deliverability, you’re still trying to hit the inbox.)

So before you hit the GMass button to send a message like this, you should take advantage of GMass’s deliverability tools.

Make sure you set up a custom tracking domain. It only takes a few minutes, but it gets you away from shared open/click tracking domains — where other senders’ reputations can affect your deliverability.

Setting up a custom tracking link

Plus GMass is one of the few email platforms that adds a free SSL certificate to your custom tracking domain — and that security is even better for deliverability.

You should also run your campaigns through GMass’s Spam Solver before you send. It will send your message to 20 seed accounts and analyze your inbox versus spam placement. And then, it will help you tweak your message until it’s hitting the inbox every time.

And before you send, check the box in the Advanced section of the settings to have GMass validate your recipients’ email addresses to avoid hard bounces.

Verify emails before sending

Strategy #4. Create a free downloadable product to supplement your offer

You want everyone who receives your affiliate emails to purchase through your link and not to go through the product’s official website.

(Or, in the case of physical products, third-party sellers like Amazon or other distributors.)

One way to get people to purchase through you is to offer them a free downloadable digital product related to what you’re selling.

For instance, if you’re part of the GMass affiliate program, you could…

  • Create a guide to switching from Mailchimp (or any other email marketing software) to GMass.
  • Offer a checklist to improve deliverability.
  • Provide a few Gmail-friendly HTML email templates.
  • Or write a step-by-step guide to setting up Amazon SES, SendGrid, or any other SMTP provider to break Gmail’s limits with GMass.

A free downloadable guide will take some time to create — no question about it. (Then again, you could just use a recent post on your blog or social media and turn that into a downloadable with a lot less work.)

But there are three enormous benefits to offering one:

  1. Establish your expertise. You’re not just an affiliate marketer or product advocate — the downloadable guide sends the signal you’ve got topical expertise. That makes someone more likely to trust your opinion and see your recommendation as credible.
  2. Eliminate switching friction. As I said earlier, people are largely reluctant to switch products. And one major reason is the effort: Learning to use something new, getting it set up to work as well as their incumbent, and mastering it going forward. The right downloadable guide can walk your prospects through that — showing them it’s not that tough and taking them step-by-step through the process.
  3. Encourages reciprocation. It’s human nature to reciprocate when someone does us a favor. When you give someone a gift, it makes them more likely to return the favor by (at the very least) replying to you. Though you’re looking for sales, not just a high response rate, those things are generally pretty correlated.

Sample template for affiliate marketers offering a downloadable guide

Hello there,

I was checking out {StoreName} a little while back (I’m planning to buy {ProductName} as a gift this Christmas) — but unfortunately, I had to add you to my list of stores with long checkout flows.

Today I’m finally emailing my list to share a really great WooCommerce plugin I work with: Speed Checkout.

It uses a statistically-proven method to increase conversions by an average of 23% by reducing the number of steps in checkout and using psychological tricks to keep customers from abandoning their carts.

Plus… when you go to their website, I’ll instantly send you a guide I created with step-by-step instructions for Speed Checkout installation and setup!

Let’s boost your conversions ASAP. Even though I’m going to convert on {ProductName} either way.

Jeff Smith

eCommerce CRO Consultant and Speed Checkout partner

Cold email affiliate marketing template 4

Setting this up in GMass

I used GMass’s unique Triggered Emails feature in this campaign. With Triggered Emails, you can automatically send recipients another email when they open or click your message.

So you can set up a triggered email with your downloadable PDF attached (or a link to your PDF) that goes out immediately when they click your affiliate link.

Using triggered email on click

It’s an excellent way to increase affiliate link click-through rate and gives you a second email touchpoint with your prospect where you can keep selling the affiliate product.

Strategy #5. Enhance the offer by including white glove onboarding

Yes, you’re selling affiliate products — but there’s no rule that says you can only sell those products.

Separate yourself from other potential affiliates selling the same product by offering to personally help your prospects get started.

Yes, that’s a lot of extra work, so it only makes sense on more lucrative products. But on programs with recurring revenue (like web hosting, email marketing software, VPNs, subscriptions, SaaS products, and so on), it’s worth your time.

Plus, your onboarding efforts should translate to your customers using the product for a longer time — which means more recurring payments.

There’s another bonus too. If you do a good job, you can end your onboarding by offering ongoing consulting services — and charge far more per hour than you’re making from affiliate sales.

Sample cold emailing template for affiliate marketing plus onboarding

Hello!

You’ve probably been thinking about switching off {EmailProvider} for a long time. It’s way more expensive than you thought, it’s missing some important features, and you’re pretty sure a lot of your emails are going to spam.

But the idea of switching sounds like a HUGE project — one you don’t have the time or mental energy for.

So I’m here to help you.

I work as a partner with GMass. If you’re not familiar, it’s one of the most popular email marketing platforms out there — and it works entirely inside Gmail. It’s more cost-effective, has more features, and better deliverability than {EmailProvider}.

And to make the switch painless… I’ll personally help you move all your email lists, automation flows, and templates over from {EmailProvider} to GMass.

You can dig into GMass here. And I’ll send you another email to schedule a time for me to help answer your questions and guide the migration.

Jeff Smith

Partner, GMass

Cold emailing for affiliate marketing template 5

Setting this up in GMass

This is another campaign that uses triggered emails. In this case, I’m sending the triggered email with a scheduling link once they click on my affiliate link.

This is also a good case for GMass’s segmented campaigns feature.

After you’ve let this campaign run for a few days, you could send a follow-up campaign just to people who opened… but didn’t click. It’s clear they’re interested, but just weren’t quite convinced enough.

Using segmented campaigns in GMass

So try to entice them with another message about why they should use the product you’re selling (and take advantage of your onboarding offer).

Cold Email for Affiliate Marketing: Takeaways and Next Steps

Affiliate marketing is an unsaturated cold email niche — in no small part because it can be challenging to effectively and credibly sell someone else’s product.

Before you dive into cold emailing your affiliate offers, you should be aware:

  • It’s not like other cold outreach. It requires a step of explaining who you are and why you’re selling the product — plus why someone should buy from you.
  • It’s not like other affiliate promotions. Cold email requires being succinct, credible, and personal — it’s different from blogging, social media, videos, and even traditional email marketing.
  • Not all companies allow affiliates to use it. The many, many “spammer” cold emailers of the world have hurt cold email’s reputation — so some companies won’t allow you to promote their products that way.
  • These promotions are for B2B only. Cold email needs to come from a business (you) to another business with a legitimate interest or need in what you’re offering.

Once you’re ready to start sending campaigns, there are five strategies to keep in mind.

  • Be clear and honest about why you’re selling this product. You don’t have to use the word “affiliate” — but also clear up who you are.
  • Find customers using flawed competitors to the product you’re selling. If you can make a compelling case why your product is significantly better than what they’re using, you can entice people to switch.
  • Demonstrate your expertise. How can you prove you are an expert on the product you’re selling — an expert whose advice is worth taking?
  • Create a free downloadable supplement. Offer a free downloadable supplement about the product to improve your credibility, eliminate the friction of switching, and trigger a reciprocity instinct.
  • Offer to help with onboarding. Separate yourself from the pack by offering to help your prospects set up the product. Plus, that could lead to high-paying consulting work once you’re done.

If you’re looking for a great email platform to use to send your affiliate cold emails, definitely take a look at GMass.

GMass works directly inside Gmail/Google Workspace so you won’t have to learn a whole new platform. And GMass makes it easier than any other software to set up things like A/B tests, automated follow-ups, and triggered emails that go out when a prospect opens or clicks.

You can get started by installing the Chrome extension — no credit card required, and not even a form to fill out! — and you’ll be up and running in a matter of minutes for your free trial.

Also… if you’re looking for a great affiliate program to promote over cold email (or any other way), check out what we’re offering at GMass.

Big recurring commissions (including the most generous year-one commission you’ll find), instant approval, a popular product with plenty of differentiators, and, yes, you can promote it over cold email.

Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge inside Gmail


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I’m going to rip off the Band-Aid here: We’re shutting down the GMass email warmup system on January 31st, 2023. (NOT the GMass email platform itself, of course. Just the warmup system.)

As the most popular email warmup system on the internet, working with more than 80,000 email accounts at any given time, we know this is big — and jarring — news.

Here’s why we’re shutting down and our recommendations for you going forward.

What!? Why Would You Shut Down Your Warmup Service?

There are three reasons we’re shutting down warmup.

First and foremost, we didn’t have a choice in the matter. Google has finally decided to clamp down on warmup.

We always suspected this day would come… and now it has. We’re surprised it took this long.

A couple of months ago, Google flat out told us to shut down our warmup system or we’d lose our Gmail API access.

They’ll soon make the same Godfather offer to the other warmup systems out there as well (if they haven’t already).

Google's email message to shut down warmup

Second, we pride ourselves on offering valuable features and services that are unique and/or better than anyone else’s. We do that with cold email and email marketing. We couldn’t do that with email warmup.

There are lots of warmup services out there and there was nothing we could offer to make ours unique or better. (Other than making it free for anyone, even non-GMass users… which we did.)

And third, it’s always been difficult to keep the warmup system running properly. The thing gave us issues at the beginning and still gives us issues today.

Isn’t There a Way You Could Run an Email Warmup System Without Gmail’s API?

There is, in theory. We could switch from using the API to a clunkier IMAP method.

But… Google isn’t dumb. They’ll know if we’re offering an IMAP-based warmup service and, more important, if you’re using an IMAP-based warmup service.

They’ve made it clear they don’t want warmup taking place at all and that they now consider it a violation of their terms of service.

Again, we’re surprised it took them this long. After all, warmup systems put strain on their systems in service of fooling their systems.

So they’ll shut off any workarounds soon enough — and quite possibly hold it against you and us for persisting.

Um… So What Do We Do About Cold Email?

The end of email warmup is bad news, no doubt about it. Warmup was a useful deliverability shortcut for all of us in the cold email game.

The silver lining is: Email warmup wasn’t the “one true magic bullet” it’s sometimes made out to be.

Yes, it made a difference for cold emailers, no doubt about it. But the difference between great deliverability and so-so deliverability was never only warmup.

There are lots of other steps you can take to improve deliverability on your new accounts in a post-warmup world.

Gradually ramp up your own sending frequency

Send to smaller, targeted groups at first. Cold email is trending this direction anyway.

Then graduate to larger and larger sends. In other words, be your own warmup system.

Write high-quality, highly personalized emails

As Google gets to know you, they test your campaigns by sending some messages to recipients inbox and some to spam.

If the inbox cohort is opening, clicking, and replying, you’ll go to more inboxes next time. If the spam cohort is marking you as not spam, you’ll go to more inboxes next time.

That means better quality emails lead to better inbox placement.

As the saying goes, if you want to avoid going to spam, don’t send spam.

Use custom tracking domains

The biggest deliverability fix you can make is using a custom tracking domain in place of the default shared one.

All GMass plans include custom tracking domains and we’re one of the only platforms anywhere to offer free SSL to make those tracking domains secure. Here’s the process for setting one up.

Take other steps to improve deliverability

Try…

And run your campaigns through Spam Solver before you send to flag potential issues — then test potential fixes for those issues.

You Won’t Need to Take Any Action As Warmup Ends

You won’t need to take any steps on your end to turn off warmup. Your email accounts will simply stop sending and receiving warmup emails on our designated end date.

Again, we know this isn’t happy news. But we also know cold emailers are about as resilient, resourceful, and clever of a group as you’ll find.

And we’re looking forward to continuing to work with you to find the best, non-TOS-violating solutions for helping you send incredible cold emails.

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


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Looking for a free email tracking tool?

Tracking your marketing and sales emails is a great way to understand how prospects engage with them and optimize your outreach strategy for better results.

And the easiest way to do that is by using free email tracking tools.

In this article, I’ll highlight ten free email tracking software, including their crucial email tracking features, pricing, and customer ratings, so that you can make the right choice for your business.

This Article Contains:

(Click on the links to jump to a specific section)

Let’s go.

Top 10 Free Email Tracking Software in 2024

Here are some of the best free email tracking software available for your large or small business:

1. GMass

Gmass

GMass is an all-in-one email tracker and marketing automation tool that works entirely inside Gmail.

Its robust email tracking capabilities and ease of use have made it a preferred outreach tool for salespeople, startup founders, small business owners, influencers, and even employees at top companies like Google and Twitter.

How do you get started with GMass?
Simply download the Googe Chrome extension from the Chrome web store and sign up for free with your Gmail or Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite) account!

Key Features

Here are five features that make GMass stand out as an email tracker from the rest of the tools in this list:

A) Email Tracking and Analytics

GMass accurately tracks multiple email metrics and provides detailed breakdowns of your email campaigns to help you analyze engagement.

When you send an email campaign using GMass, it automatically generates a Campaign Report in your Gmail inbox, which tracks core email metrics like:

  • Unique Opens: The total number of unique email addresses that opened your email.
  • Didn’t Open: The total number of email addresses that didn’t open your sales email.
  • Unique Clicks: The total number of your recipients who clicked at least one link in your sent email.
  • Replies: The total number of recipients that replied to your email.
  • Bounces: The total number of undelivered emails sent to invalid email addresses.

Analytics

For convenience, GMass also lets you track your bulk emails and campaign performance in two other ways:

  • Go to the GMass dashboard to access all your current email campaign reports.
  • Click on the links on the dashboard or your Google Inbox to obtain a web-based report of your campaigns.
B) Automated Email Personalization

If you want to grab and retain a prospect’s attention, your email must stand out in their inbox — instead of getting lost with all the other important emails.

How do you do that?
A great practice is personalizing your outreach messages based on who you’re emailing.

However, manually personalizing each email is impossible when you have a long prospect list.

Don’t worry.
Just use GMass’ automatic personalization feature!

As one of the best email software solutions in the market, GMass lets you automatically personalize almost everything about your email, including:

Personalization

C) Automatic Follow-Ups

Based on how prospects interacted with your first email, you may have to send out follow-up emails to boost response rates.

But what if you’ve to follow up with hundreds of recipients?
Enter GMass’ automatic follow-ups!

It lets you automate up to eight stages of follow-up emails and offers customizations like:

  • Choose when to send a follow-up — when a recipient opens your email message, clicks a specific link in your email, or when they don’t reply for a few days.
  • Decide how many follow-up email messages each person receives.
  • The time between follow-ups.
  • The follow-up email content.

Follow-ups

D) Email Scheduling

With the GMass email scheduling feature, you can automatically schedule emails to be sent at a date and time you prefer.

This feature lets recipients receive your email when they’re most likely to respond.

Scheduling emails is quick and easy to do from a simple dropdown menu inside Gmail’s Compose window. And if you wish to reschedule your emails, you can easily do so from the Gmail drafts folder.

Email scheduling

E) Email List Building

GMass’s mailing list feature allows you to send emails to targeted groups of people.

It helps you search for keywords related to your target audience in Gmail and automatically builds a mailing list based on the search results.

Email list building

Moreover, if you already have a mailing list stored on Googe Sheets, Excel, or as a CSV file, you can also easily connect it to GMass.

Additional GMass Features

GMass offers many more advanced features to help your marketing and sales team with their email outreach efforts.

  • Recurring Emails: Expand your prospect pool by scheduling recurring emails on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
  • Reply Management: Automatically organize the replies for your email marketing campaigns by classifying responses as replies, bounces, block notifications, and more.
  • A/B Testing: Split your sales email into multiple variations to find the version that draws the most engagement.
  • Google Sheets Mail Merge: Initiate mail merges by connecting your Google Sheet data to GMass.
  • Behavior-based Campaigns: Send automated, customized emails depending on how a prospect engaged with your older emails.
  • Mobile Add-on: Use GMass’ email capabilities with its add-on for Gmail’s Android app.

Pricing

GMass has different pricing plans to suit various customer needs:

  • Individual:
    • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
    • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
    • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
  • Team:
    • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.7/5 (790+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.8/5 (820+ reviews)

2. Benchmark Email

Benchmark

Benchmark Email is a simple email marketing tool for sending personalized emails at scale.

Key Features

  • Use pre-built email templates for any occasion.
  • Create better email campaigns by understanding how subscribers interact with your emails through A/B testing and other reporting features.
  • Use list builders, automations, surveys, and polls to build a loyal fanbase that engages with your message.
  • Integrate with over 1500 services, including WordPress, Google, Zapier, Shopify, and more.

Pricing

Benchmark Email has a free plan with basic email marketing and automation. Paid plans start at $15/month for 500 contacts.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.2/5 (60+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.2/5 (150+ reviews)

3. Mixmax 

Mixmax

Mixmax is a sales engagement and email marketing platform that helps you easily create, edit, and track email sequences.

Key Features

  • Create personalized email sequences for your prospects.
  • Monitor engagement metrics like email opens and click-through rates.
  • Set up flexible alerts depending on email engagement across text, email, or Slack.
  • Analyze the performance of links and attachments in your sales campaign sequence.

Pricing

Mixmax has a free plan for tracking 100 emails a month. Paid plans start at $12/user per month.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.6/5 (1000+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (170+ reviews)

Back to Contents 

4. Boomerang

Boomerang

Boomerang is an email tracking and scheduling software solution you can use with your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook accounts.

Key Features

  • Get notified when prospects open your email or click on an included link.
  • Use the response tracking feature to follow up with recipients who don’t respond within a certain time.
  • Schedule your emails to reach prospects at their peak hours.
  • Use Boomerang’s Respondable AI feature to draft highly effective emails and follow-ups.

Pricing

The free plan lets you send 10 emails per month and supports tracking and scheduling features. Paid plans start at $4.98/month for Gmail and $4.99/month for Microsoft Outlook.

Customer Ratings

  • G2:
    • Boomerang for Gmail: 4.4/5 (220+ reviews)
    • Boomerang for Outlook: 4.3/5 (50+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.7/5 (140+ reviews)

5. HubSpot Sales Hub

Hubspot

HubSpot Sales Hub is an outbound sales and email platform offering deep insights into your prospects and helping you automate the email outreach process.

Key Features

  • Know when a lead opens your email so you can follow up with them at the right time and close deals faster.
  • Set up a series of personalized email messages and follow-up tasks to ensure you stay top of mind throughout the sales process.
  • Develop a library of helpful sales content for your entire team and share documents from your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook inbox.
  • Eliminate friction by bringing all your tools and data together on one easy-to-use, powerful CRM platform.

Pricing

HubSpot Sales Hub offers a free plan with no credit card required, while paid plans start at $45/month for 1000 contacts.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.4/5 (8,900+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (320+ reviews)

6. MailChimp 

Mailchimp

MailChimp is a marketing automation software tool and email marketing service for managing mailing lists and creating email marketing campaigns.

Key Features

  • Draw your readers in with the right subject lines based on feedback from its Subject Line Helper.
  • Draft more relevant emails with behavior-based automated journeys created in its Customer Journey Builder.
  • Focus on establishing relationships with your audience and see a higher return on your efforts.
  • See what’s working in your email campaigns and track your sales with Reports.

Pricing

MailChimp has a free plan with a monthly send limit of 10,000 emails. Paid plans start at $11/month for 500 contacts.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.3/5 (11,900+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (14,700+ reviews)

Back to Contents

7. MailTrack

Mailtrack

MailTrack is an email tracking tool for Gmail web, iOS, and Android. It provides detailed insights into your engagement levels with comprehensive metrics about your tracking email history, an activity dashboard, and a daily report.

Key Features

  • Receive a read receipt in your inbox if recipients read your email.
  • Get a real-time desktop notification when a recipient reads your email through the informed delivery feature.
  • The incoming tracked email indicator lets you know if a sender is tracking your incoming emails.
  • Receive daily reports about emails you’ve sent, including the number of sent emails, percentage of opened emails, and percentage of links recipients clicked on.

Pricing

MailTrack offers a free plan with unlimited email tracking, while paid plans start at $1.99/user per month.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.6/5 (100+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (160+ reviews)

8. Right Inbox

Rightinbox

Right Inbox is a free email tracker that lets you and your sales rep view who opens and clicks your emails. It also allows you to schedule the emails to be sent later and follow up with reminders.

Key Features

  • Notifies you when an intended recipient has engaged with your email.
  • Its link click tracking informs you when a recipient has clicked on a link in your email.
  • The tool scans your replies and sends the perfect email template to interested parties.
  • Helps you create different email signatures and apply the perfect one for every situation.

Pricing

Right Inbox offers a free plan with 10 emails/month and unlimited CRM sync. Paid plans begin at $7.95/month.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: NA
  • Capterra: 4.3/5 (10+ reviews)

9. SalesHandy 

Saleshandy

SalesHandy is a sales engagement software platform that enables sales teams to scale their email outreach operations seamlessly.

Key Features

  • Get notified about when and how many times recipients opened or replied to your email.
  • Receive a real-time desktop notification when someone opens your email.
  • Enable the “Link Tracking” option from Settings in your email compose box to track the link in your email.
  • Quickly identify the important email replies in your otherwise flooded inbox.

Pricing

SalesHandy offers a free plan with email scheduling, unlimited email open tracking, and a Gmail integration. Paid plans start at $12/user per month.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.5/5 (160+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (110+ reviews)

10. Yesware

Yesware

Yesware is an email tracking solution that helps email marketers monitor outreach campaigns through helpful tracking reports and analytics.

Key Features

  • Track email opens and clicks to analyze engagement.
  • Connect with multiple recipients personally with multi-channel email campaigns.
  • Draft emails and save them as templates to reuse the perfect ones at the right time.
  • View detailed statistics regarding which emails, links, and attachments recipients engage with recipients the most.

Pricing

Yesware offers a free plan with basic email tracking, while paid plans start at $19/user per month.

Customer Ratings

  • G2: 4.4/5 (750+ reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.3/5 (160+ reviews)

Back to Contents

Wrapping Up

Email trackers help monitor your outreach efforts and provide insights into a prospect’s behavior. This enables you to minimize wasted opportunities and improve your chance of getting a reply.

If you’re looking for a free email tracker solution to boost your engagements, why not try GMass?

Its advanced email tracking features help you easily analyze your email campaign performance. It also helps you drive behavior-based campaigns, personalize your outreach efforts, and do so much more for free.

Download the GMass Google Chrome extension and track all your emails today!

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass


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While email outreach is one of the sharpest arrows in your sales-marketing quiver, not knowing how clients respond to your message can blunt its effectiveness.

That’s why you should track your email performance. It helps you determine if recipients clicked, opened, or ignored your messages and tweak your campaign strategy for better outcomes.

In this article, I’ll discuss email tracking in depth. I’ll cover what it is, its four major benefits, how it works, and the best way to track your emails.

Further Reading:

This Article Contains:

(click on a link below to jump to a specific section)

Let’s dive in.

What Is Email Tracking?

Email tracking is the process of monitoring your recipients’ interactions with your sent email messages. It provides clear insights into the level of engagement your emails receive, such as:

  • The exact time readers opened your message.
  • The frequency of interaction with your emails.
  • The clickthrough rate for links and attachments, and so on.

But email tracking isn’t just about analytical metrics. When used effectively, it can also:

And you can get all these insights with an email tracking tool that can undertake the bulk of your email tracking work.

Now that you know what email tracking is, let’s take a quick look at how it works.

Back to Contents

How Does Email Tracking Work?

Here are three techniques commonly used by email tracking tools to track a message:

1. Read Receipts

A read receipt is an email tracking feature used by email clients like Gmail, Apple Mail, and Microsoft Outlook to send you a real-time notification whenever a recipient opens your email.

With read receipts, you can verify email deliverability and ensure that the right person engages with your message.

However, they have certain limitations, such as:

  • The recipient must authorize the sending of the read receipt or permit it in their email client settings.
  • A read receipt only works if you and the recipient have the same email client.

2. Image Pixels

The most common way for email open tracking is to embed a 1-pixel invisible image (tracking pixel) into an individual email. It’s used by most email tracking software and tools like Google Analytics.

When the reader opens your message, their email client connects with the image server to load the tracking pixel, and it’s logged as the email open.

However, recipients could use pixel blocking tools like PixelBlock and Email Privacy Protector to block the tracking pixel, preventing you from tracking the email engagement.

3. Trackable Links

Another way email tracking tools track engagement is by including a trackable link in the email body.

What’s a trackable link?
It’s a URL containing a short text code (tracking code) that can be deciphered by a tracking tool and used to track your campaign’s performance.

Once a recipient clicks on the trackable email link, the tracking software will decode the link and send you a notification about who clicked on it and when.

But that’s not all!

You’ll also get additional link tracking data like:

  • The number of clicks.
  • The recipient’s geo-location.
  • The web browser used to access the link, and more.

Note: If the recipient has their Mail Privacy Protection setting turned on (in Apple Mail), you won’t be able to access their IP address or geo-location.

Back to Contents

Next, let’s explore how you can track your sales and marketing emails.

How to Track Your Emails?

If you want to track your emails, you need to find the right email tracking software for your needs.

This can be a simple add-on or plugin that only tracks email open rates or a comprehensive tool that provides real-time reports and analytics.

Irrespective of the email tracking feature you require, there are several tracking software tools you can choose from, such as:

The Best Email Tracking Software in 2022: GMass

Gmass

GMass is a robust email outreach and tracking tool that allows you to execute email marketing campaigns from inside your Google inbox. Its powerful mail merge capabilities make it a favorite email tracker among employees at social media companies like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Using the GMass Google Chrome extension, you can:

  • Accurately track email metrics automatically. (We’re even the first cold email software to separate potentially false opens from Apple Mail Privacy Protection.)
  • Send mass automated follow-ups for maximum engagement.
  • Automatically personalize your sales or marketing email campaigns.
  • Schedule mass emails effortlessly.
  • Send sales and marketing campaigns quickly.
  • Perform mail merges using Google Sheets.

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the key features of GMass’ email tracker:

1. Advanced Mail Merge Reports and Email Analytics

GMass accurately tracks different email metrics to deliver comprehensive breakdowns in your campaign reports.

The campaign analytics report is auto-generated once you send an email campaign and includes metrics like:

  • Total Recipients: The total number of email IDs to which an email campaign was sent.
  • Unique Email Opens: The total number of unique recipients that opened your sales or marketing email.
  • Unique Clicks: The total number of unique email IDs that clicked on at least one link in your email.
  • Didn’t Open: The total number of email recipients who didn’t open your email.
  • Replies: The total number of email IDs that replied to your campaign.
  • Rejections because your Gmail account is over-limit: The total number of recipients who didn’t receive your emails because of your Gmail account’s limited sending ability.
  • Unsubscribes: The total number of email recipients who unsubscribed from your sales or marketing emails.
  • Bounces: The total number of emails returned as undeliverable because of the recipients’ invalid addresses.
  • Blocks: The total number of undelivered emails because the recipient’s address rejected your email as spam.

Campaigns

Unlike other email marketing tools such as SalesHandy or ContactMonkey, you obtain GMass campaign reports right inside your Google inbox for easy access.

But that’s not all. The GMass email tracker also allows you to track email metrics using a dedicated, flexible dashboard on both desktop and mobile platforms.

2. Automatic Follow-Ups

Based on your campaign responses, you may have to send meaningful follow-ups to engage recipients.

However, manually following up with individual email recipients can be challenging when you have a large email list.

No worries!

With the GMass mail tracker, you can easily automate the follow up process to target recipients for maximum engagement.

You can customize:

  • The contents of your follow-up email message right inside your Gmail inbox.
  • The number of follow up messages for each recipient.
  • The time interval between follow-ups.
  • The trigger for sending a follow-up email.

Automatic follow-ups

Back to Contents

3. Effective Email Personalization

No one wants to see a generic and ugly email in their inbox!

That’s why GMass gives you an automated personalization feature to customize your sales and marketing emails on a recipient-by-recipient basis.

The advanced functionality in GMass comes with:

  • Automatic first name detection: GMass auto-detects your recipients’ first names from their email addresses and adds them to the emails directed to them.
  • Personalized text blocks: With GMass, you can personalize complete text blocks in your email depending on the recipient.
  • Personalized attachments: The tool lets you send personalized attachments to every recipient.
  • Customized images and links: Using GMass, you can include customized links and external images for every email recipient.

Customize

4. Schedule Email Campaigns

If you want people to engage with your emails, your email should reach the right inbox at the right time.

Why?
Let’s say your recipient lives in a different time zone. A campaign you sent at 10 A.M. might reach them at midnight in their time zone, undermining your email’s success.

To avoid such problems, the GMass mail tracker lets you schedule your messages in advance to plan more effective email marketing campaigns — you won’t have to stay online once you schedule your emails.

If you want to change the schedule at any time, you can always reschedule your tracked email in the Gmail Drafts folder.

Schedule

Ajay’s Bonus Tip

Set clear guidelines for your sales and marketing teams to ensure proper use of the email tracking software. For example, you should clarify when and how to respond to a recipient once you receive a ‘read’ real-time notification.

You should also specify the use of the email tracking software in your organization’s privacy policy and inform people when they sign up for email subscriptions.

Back to Contents

Let’s now explore the major advantages of tracking your emails.

4 Remarkable Benefits of Email Tracking

Here are four reasons to track your emails:

1. Gain Insights for Campaign Optimization

Knowing what emails receive maximum clicks, are most read, or are regularly overlooked helps you determine what changes to make to your email marketing campaign for better results.

Once you identify your campaign’s strengths and weaknesses, you can:

  • Optimize future email marketing campaigns for more responses.
  • Personalize sales and marketing emails according to recipients’ needs.
  • Build a more responsive list of email contacts who engage with your messages.

For example:

  • If prospects spend more time on emails with images and videos, you can focus on adding attractive images and videos (of your product or service) in future emails.
  • If you get more clicks by sharing a case study to back your sales claims, you can delve into including more case studies, testimonials, and research data.

2. Save Time for Impactful Follow-ups

Email tracking lets you know if prospects found your first email intriguing enough to open and are receptive to follow-ups.

If they ignore your initial outreach emails and the next couple of follow ups, they’re unlikely to engage with future messages too. In such cases, you can save time by redirecting marketing emails to leads interested in your campaign.

You can also learn how often a recipient interacts with your tracked email and schedule timely follow-ups. Keep an eye on the email open rates and email link clicks on your outbound messages to follow up when readers are most likely to engage.

3. Get the Context for Prospect Interaction

If you want to build and nurture relationships with prospects, it’s crucial to understand how they interact with your emails.

It helps you tweak your email marketing strategy to cater to the specific needs of your recipient.

For instance:

  • Contacts who open your emails more than once a day will be receptive to follow ups while you’re still top-of-mind.
  • Including links or attachments in an email and tracking the clicks they receive lets you know if readers are interested in your product or service.
  • Tracking follow-up emails help you gauge if readers/subscribers are reviewing your messages after the initial outreach.

These email analytics provide a context to calibrate your outreach campaigns for maximum engagement.

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4. Build A Robust Email Schedule

Outreach and follow-up emails sent randomly can often turn off clients and appear spammy.

That’s why developing the perfect email schedule is vital to boosting engagement among your prospects.

How does email tracking software help here?
It helps you study your recipients’ responses to your emails and set a schedule around the time they’re willing and prepared to engage with your email message.

You get precise details of the exact time recipients engage with your emails and follow-ups, helping you develop a robust email schedule for each contact on your mailing list.

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Wrapping Up

Tracking your emails is an effective way to identify problem areas in your marketing and sales efforts. Once you determine how recipients engage with your emails, you can develop a strategy tailored to their preferences.

And that’s where an email tracking tool like GMass can come in handy. It can automatically track your sent email messages, helping you gain accurate insights into their performance.

Why not download the free GMass Google Chrome extension to track all your email campaigns today?

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews


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Mail tracker tools help you find out if and to what extent recipients engage with your emails in real-time and provide insights into potential prospects.

And with the right software, you can quickly increase your email outreach and create personal relationships with multiple recipients.

In this article, I’ll explain what to look out for in email trackers and highlight the 10 best email tracker tools to use in 2022. I’ll go over each tool’s features, pricing plans, and customer ratings to help you out.

Further Reading:

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

Let’s begin.

What to Look for in an Email Tracking Tool?

Here are six features to look for when considering email trackers:

  • Real-Time Email Tracking: Discovering in real-time when a recipient opens your email is vital for potential follow-ups and finding out which campaigns are effective.
  • Tracking Types: Know what types of engagements your software is tracking. When recipients open your email or click on links are the most important engagements to track, followed by replies and bounces.
  • Email Tracking Reports and Analytics: Detailed reports about who engaged with your email and when they read it provide insights into your marketing strategies.
  • Pricing: An affordable pricing plan that suits your needs ensures you’re getting value for money. There are plenty of powerful and free email tracking tools out there.
  • Secure Mail Privacy Protection: Email trackers often save the IP addresses of your recipients and read the contents of your emails. Make sure email tracking tools don’t steal your personal information.

But how exactly does mail tracking work?
When sending a tracked email, a unique invisible tracking pixel is inserted and sent with your mail. And when the recipient opens your email, the tracking pixel is loaded — which tells you that the recipient read your email.

Go back to Contents

Now that I’ve covered the essential features let’s explore the top mail tracking tools on the market today.

10 Best Email Tracker Tools to Use in 2024

Here’s a list of the top 10 mail tracker tools:

1. GMass

Gmass

GMass is a powerful email tracker and marketing automation tool that works entirely inside Gmail or on your Android device.

Its advanced email tracking capabilities have made it a must-have option among sales managers, startup founders, small business owners, influencers, and even employees at top companies like Google and Twitter.

GMass Key Features

Here are five critical GMass features that make it stand out as a top-quality mail tracker tool:

A. Mail Tracking & Analytics

GMass accurately tracks various email metrics and gives you detailed breakdowns of your campaigns. When you send an email campaign with GMass, it automatically generates a Campaign Report in your Gmail inbox.

Some of the metrics tracked by GMass include:

  1. Unique Opens: The total number of unique certified mail IDs that opened your email.
  2. Didn’t Open: The total number of certified mail IDs that didn’t open your email.
  3. Unique Clicks: The total number of unique recipients that clicked at least one link in your email.
  4. Replies: The total number of recipients that replied to your mail.
  5. Bounces: The total number of undelivered emails sent to invalid email addresses.
  6. Unsubscribes: The total number of people who unsubscribed after a campaign.

Mail tracking

For maximum convenience, GMass lets you track your emails and campaign performance in 3 ways:

  • Get your campaign reports inside Gmail via GMass’s automated reporting emails.
  • The GMass dashboard shows all your current campaign reports.
  • Access a web-based report of your campaigns by clicking on the links in your Gmail or on the dashboard.
B. Automated Email Personalisation

To make sure you grab a prospect’s attention, you’re going to want to stand out from the crowd and avoid sounding like other generic cold emails.

But how do you do that?
A smart strategy is to add a touch of personality to your emails and make sure you cater to the needs of potential prospects.

That’s where GMass’ automated personalization feature comes in.

GMass lets you tailor your emails to the needs of your multiple recipients on a person-by-person basis with advanced functionality, like:

  • Auto first name detection and entry: GMass automatically detects a person’s first name from their certified mail ID and adds it to that recipient’s email.
  • Personalize blocks of text: The tool lets you personalize large blocks of text in your emails on a person-to-person basis.
  • Add personalized attachments: Send personalized attachments for each unique recipient.
  • Customized links and images: Add customized URLs and images for each recipient.

Personalization

C. Automatic Follow-Ups

Once you’ve received some responses to your emails, you’ll have to scan through your replies and send some meaningful feedback.

But what if you have hundreds of emails to follow up on?
Enter GMass’ automatic follow-ups!

It sends automated follow-ups to your recipients for maximum engagement, and you can even customize your replies, for example:

  • Choose when to send a follow-up: GMass can send follow-ups when a recipient opens your email, clicks a particular link in your email, or when they don’t reply for a few days. Now you don’t have to scan through hundreds of replies.
  • Decide how many follow-up emails each person receives: You can select the number of follow-up emails each recipient will receive.
  • The time between follow-ups: You pick how long the time gap is between follow-up emails.
  • The follow-up email content: Write your own follow-up emails and save them as templates.

Automated Follow-ups

D. Email Scheduling

With GMass’ email scheduling feature, you can automatically send your emails at the date and time of your choosing. This way, recipients receive your email when they’re likely to respond.

Just set up your email schedule, and your recipients will receive incoming mail at the right time, regardless of their time zone.

Email scheduling is quick and easy to do from a simple dropdown menu.

Email scheduling

E. Email List Building

A successful email campaign rests on your emails reaching the right people.

But how do you find them?
GMass’s mailing list feature lets you quickly send emails to targeted groups of people

It enables you to search for keywords related to your target audience in Gmail and automatically builds a mailing list based on your search results.

Moreover, if you’ve already created a mailing list stored on a Googe Sheet, an Excel, or a CSV file, you can easily connect it to GMass.

List Buliding

On top of these five features, GMass has a variety of advanced functionalities.

Additional GMass Features

GMass offers several more advanced features to help improve your outreach and monitor your engagements:

  • Behavior-Based Campaigns: Send automated and customized messages based on your recipients’ actions after your previous emails.
  • Email Templates: Create and save emails as templates so you can reuse your most successful ones for future campaigns.
  • A/B Testing: Test multiple variations of your emails to determine which version draws the most engagement.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Check how recipients respond to your emails with a sentiment score indicating positive or negative sentiment.

Ready to give GMass a try?
Just download the Chrome extension and sign up for a free trial using your Gmail or Google Workspace account.

GMass Pricing

GMass has several pricing plans to suit various customer needs:

  • Individual:
    • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
    • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
    • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
  • Team:
    • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

GMass Customer Ratings

  • Capterra: 4.8/5 (810+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.7/5 (780+ reviews).

Go back to Contents

2. MailTrack

Mailtrack

MailTrack is an email tracking service for Gmail web, IOS, and Android that provides detailed insights into your engagement levels with comprehensive metrics about your mail tracking history, an activity dashboard, and a daily report.

MailTrack Key Features

  • Get a read receipt in your inbox if recipients read your email.
  • Get a real-time notification when a recipient reads your email via the informed delivery feature.
  • An incoming tracked email indicator lets you know if the sender the sender tracks your incoming mail.
  • Receive a daily report about the emails you’ve sent, including the number of emails sent, the percentage of opened emails, and the percentage of links that recipients clicked on.

MailTrack Pricing

MailTrack offers three pricing plans:

  • Free:
    • Unlimited mail tracking.
    • Real-time notifications.
    • Email alerts.
    • Daily report.
  • Pro ($1.99/month):
    • All “Free” features.
    • Link tracking.
    • Full tracking history.
    • And more.
  • Advanced ($4.99/month):
    • All “Pro” features.
    • Group emails are individually tracked.
    • Campaigns & reports.
    • And more.

MailTrack Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (163+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.6/5 (106+ reviews).

3. Right Inbox

Rightinbox

Right Inbox is a free email tracker solution that lets you or your sales rep see who opens and clicks your emails, allows you to schedule emails to be sent later, and follows up with reminders.

Right Inbox Key Features

  • Email tracking lets you know when an intended recipient has engaged with your email.
  • Link tracking informs you when a recipient has clicked on a link in your email.
  • Create different signatures and apply the perfect one for every situation.
  • Scan your replies and send the perfect email template to interested parties.

Right Inbox Pricing

Right Inbox offers three pricing plans for customers:

  • Free:
    • 10 send later emails per month.
    • 10 reminders per month.
    • 10 private notes per month.
    • No recurring emails.
  • Paid Plan ($7.95/month):
    • Includes everything in the “Yearly” price bracket.
    • Unlimited send later emails per month.
    • Unlimited reminders per month.
    • Unlimited private notes per month.
    • Unlimited recurring emails.

Right Inbox Customer Ratings

  • Capterra: 4.3/5 (12+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.8/5 (5+ reviews).

4. Hunter

Hunter

Hunter is a mail tracking service that lets you find professional email addresses, monitor the delivery status of your emails, and provide insights into your engagement levels.

Hunter Key Features

  • Find out when your sent email is opened with a read receipt.
  • Discover how many times recipients read your emails.
  • Learn which devices (computer, mobile, or tablet) open your emails.
  • Verify up to tens of thousands of email IDs a month.

Hunter Pricing

Hunter offers five pricing plans:

  • Free:
    • 25 monthly searches.
    • Campaigns for 1 email account.
    • 500 recipients per campaign.
  • Starter ($49/month):
    • 500 monthly searches.
    • Campaigns for 5 email accounts.
    • 2,500 recipients per campaign.
    • Includes link tracking.
  • Growth ($99/month):
    • 2,500 monthly searches.
    • Campaigns for 10 email accounts.
    • 5,000 recipients per campaign.
    • Includes link tracking.
  • Pro ($199/month):
    • 10,000 monthly searches.
    • Campaigns for 20 email accounts.
    • 7,500 recipients per campaign.
    • Includes link tracking.
  • Business ($399/month):
    • 30,000 monthly searches.
    • Campaigns for 40 email accounts.
    • 10,000 recipients per campaign.
    • Includes link tracking.

Hunter Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.6/5 (511+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.4/5 (427+ reviews).

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5. Mixmax

Mixmax

Mixmax is a free-to-use mail tracker tool that allows you to see when and if someone reads your email.

Mixmax Key Features

  • Track who opened your sent email with a read receipt.
  • Instantly schedule emails to be sent at a time of your choosing.
  • Save your favorite emails as templates to easily reuse them another time.
  • Get feedback about which attachments boosted engagements the most.

Mixmax Pricing

Mixmax provides a free plan and four paid plans:

  • Free Plan:
    • Instant scheduling.
    • Email tracking.
    • And more.
  • Starter Plan ($9/month):
    • Everything in the “Free” Plan.
    • Sidechat.
    • No “Sent with Mixmax” signature.
    • And more.
  • SMB ($24/month):
    • Everything in the “Starter” plan.
    • Mail merge.
    • Shared email templates.
    • And more.
  • Growth ($49/month):
    • Everything in the “SMB” plan.
    • Sequence personalization.
    • Reporting & analytics.
    • And more.
  • Enterprise (custom pricing):
    • Everything in the “Starter” plan.
    • Tasks & automation.
    • Admin controls.
    • And more.

Mixmax Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.6/5 (178+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.6/5 (968+ reviews).

6. Mailbutler

Mailbutler

Mailbutler is an email tracking and project management software that tells you and your sales rep when your emails were opened and helps improve internal communications across team members. The Mailbutler tracking app is available on IOS and Android.

Mailbutler Key Features

  • Get an informed delivery notification when recipients read your Gmail or Apple Mail messages. Find out how often they were opened and where the intended recipient was when they opened them.
  • Schedule your emails to send at a different time or have the scheduling automated for you.
  • Recall a sent email before delivery to fix any mistakes.
  • Set yourself reminders to follow up on emails.

Mailbutler Pricing

Mailbuter has four pricing plans:

  • Essential (free):
    • Track when your emails are opened.
    • Schedule your emails to be sent later.
    • Recall sent emails.
    • And more.
  • Professional ($9.95/month):
    • Everything from the “Essential” plan.
    • No Mailbutler watermark.
    • Insert message templates instantly.
    • And more.
  • Professional+ ($15.95/month):
    • Everything from the “Professional” plan.
    • Advanced email tracking insights.
    • Recommendations on when to send your email for the best results.
    • And more.
  • Business ($37.95/month):
    • Everything from the “Professional +” plan.
    • Create teams for improved internal communications.
    • Manage your customer relationships directly in your inbox.
    • And more.

Mailbutler Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.7/5 (72+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.4/5 (53+ reviews).

7. Snov.io

Snov

Snov.io is a real-time mail tracking service that notifies you or your sales rep when recipients read your emails and lets you see a full history of email opens so you can optimize your email outreach efforts.

Snov.io Key Features

  • Get an informed delivery notification the second your email is opened.
  • Find and verify emails.
  • Follow-up at the perfect time with Snov.io’s Remind Me feature.
  • Set your emails to be sent at a specific time in the future to maximize engagement.

Snov.io Pricing

Snov.io offers five different pricing plans:

  • S ($33/month)
    • 1,000 bulk domain searches.
    • 1,000 single domain searches.
    • Verify over 2,000 email addresses.
  • M ($83/month)
    • 5,000 bulk domain searches.
    • 5,000 single domain searches.
    • Verify over 10,000 email addresses.
  • L ($158/month)
    • 20,000 bulk domain searches.
    • 20,000 single domain searches.
    • Verify over 40 000 email addresses.
    • A/B testing.
  • XL ($308/month)
    • 50,000 bulk domain searches.
    • 50,000 single domain searches.
    • Verify over 100,000 email addresses.
    • Unlimited campaigns.
  • XXL ($615/month)
    • 100,000 bulk domain searches.
    • 100,000 single domain searches.
    • Technology finder.

Snov.io Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.6/5 (119+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.5/5 (177+ reviews).

Go back to Contents

8. HubSpot Sales Hub

Hubspot

HubSpot Sales Hub is a mail tracker and sales tool that help your sales team and marketers manage their engagement levels, improve internal communications, and grow their business. The Hubspot CRM and tracking app is available on IOS and Android devices.

HubSpot Sales Hub Key Features

  • Receive an informed delivery notification the moment a recipient reads your email message.
  • Send perfectly timed follow-up emails to help you close deals.
  • See the engagement history of a recipient to monitor outreach performance.
  • Transform your best emails into templates and share them with your team.

HubSpot Sales Hub Pricing

Hubspot Sales Hub offers a free plan and three paid plans for all needs:

  • Free:
    • Mail tracking & informed delivery notifications (200 notifications/month).
    • 1 deal pipeline per account.
    • Email scheduling.
    • And more.
  • Starter ($45/month includes 2 users):
    • Everything in the “Free” plan.
    • Unlimited mail tracking & informed delivery notifications.
    • 2 deal pipelines per account.
    • And more.
  • Professional ($450/month includes 5 users):
    • Everything in the “Starter” plan.
    • 15 deal pipelines/account.
    • Includes product library, eSignature, and Stripe integration.
    • And more.
  • Enterprise ($1,200/month includes 10 users):
    • Everything in the “Professional” plan.
    • 1,000 deal pipelines per account.
    • And more.

Hubspot Sales Hub Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (316+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.4/5 (7,862 reviews).

9. Yesware

Yesware

Yesware is a mail tracking solution that helps your marketers monitor your outreach campaigns with helpful tracking reports and analytics for increased customer success.

Yesware Key Features

  • Track email message opens and clicks to see who’s read your emails.
  • Connect with multiple recipients in a personalized way with multi-channel campaigns.
  • Draft your emails and save them as templates to reuse the perfect ones at the right time.
  • See detailed statistics about which emails, links, and attachments recipients engage with most.

Yesware Pricing

Yesware offers four plans:

  • Free Forever:
    • Basic email open tracking.
    • Basic attachment tracking.
    • And more.
  • Pro ($15/month):
    • Unlimited email open tracking.
    • Unlimited email link tracking.
    • Unlimited attachment tracking.
    • And more.
  • Premium ($35/month):
    • Everything in the “Pro” plan.
    • Unlimited Campaigns.
    • Shared Templates & Campaigns.
    • And more.
  • Enterprise ($65/month):
    • Everything in the “Premium” plan.
    • Salesforce Inbox Sidebar.
    • Salesforce Email Sent Sync.
    • And more.

Yesware Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.3/5 (166+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.4/5 (756+ reviews).

10. Streak

Streak

Streak is a mail tracker tool that helps marketers reduce wasted opportunities by giving detailed email tracking and behavior-based automated tools. Streak is available as a Chrome extension on your desktop, and the tracking app is available on iPhone and Android devices.

Streak Key Features

  • Get informed delivery notifications when recipients read your email message.
  • Automatically follow up once an intended recipient has read your email or clicked a link.
  • Optimize your pipeline with personalized email templates.
  • Schedule your emails to send later, so recipients read them at the right time.

Streak Pricing

Streak offers a free plan and three paid plans:

  • Free:
    • Basic CRM 500.
    • Mail merge 50.
    • Email tracking.
  • Solo ($15/month):
    • Basic CRM 5,000.
    • Mail merge 800.
    • Link tracking.
  • Pro ($49/month):
    • Unlimited advanced CRM.
    • Mail merge 1,500.
    • Shared pipelines.
  • Enterprise ($129/month)
    • Custom permissions.
    • Data validation.
    • Priority support.

Streak Customer Rating

  • Capterra: 4.5/5 (417+ reviews).
  • G2: 4.5/5 (163+ reviews).

Go back to Contents

Wrapping Up

Mail trackers help you monitor your email outreach efforts and provide insights into prospects’ behavior to minimize wasted opportunities and improve your chance of getting a reply.

If you’re looking for a powerful email tracker solution to boost your engagements, why not try GMass?

GMass’ advanced email open and link tracking helps you know which campaigns receive the most engagement and provides useful analytics to monitor your outreach efforts. On top of its advanced features, GMass helps you drive behavior-based campaigns, personalize your outreach efforts, and so much more.

Download the GMass Google Chrome extension and improve your outreach efforts today!

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass


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The sales pipeline and sales funnel are two sales models that represent the buyer journey as leads turn into prospects and customers.

While both give you a clear picture of the sales process, they serve different purposes.
And understanding the pipeline funnel differences is essential to utilizing them efficiently.

In this article, I’ll make a quick comparison between the two models and delve into their unique benefits to help you understand which one best serves your business needs.

This Article Contains:

(Click on the links to jump to specific sections)

Let’s dive in.

Note: To understand the differences between pipelines and funnels, it’s integral to first know what they are. That’s why I’ll briefly go over each model first. 

However, feel free to skip ahead to the comparison if that’s all you’re looking for.

What Is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a holistic visual representation of the sales stages a prospect goes through as they move from being a new lead to a customer.

It highlights the customer’s journey from a sales viewpoint, helping you visualize the sales process and identify potential customers at each stage.

A salesperson can use the pipeline chart to direct prospects along the ideal customer journey and improve their sales strategy.

But just like how a sales cycle is unique to a business, a sales pipeline will be unique too.

Ideally, a pipeline chart should be tailored to a business’s sales process. This will help you discover opportunities for improvements, reduce the time it takes to close deals, and accurately forecast revenue.

Generally, sales pipeline management involves six key stages:

1. Lead Generation

The first stage in a typical sales pipeline is lead generation, which sets the ball rolling for the rest of your sales efforts.

Lead generation involves finding people who need your business’s products or services — your target audience.

You can generate leads through:

  • Cold emails.
  • Digital marketing, including content marketing, social media marketing, and ads.
  • Referral programs.
  • Cold calling, and so on.

Want to improve your lead generation strategy?
Check out these no-nonsense tips to generate sales leads effectively.

2. Lead Qualification

Once you’ve generated leads, you need to qualify them using relevant sales qualifiers.

Qualifying leads helps you determine if the generated leads match your:

  • Ideal customer profile: essential requirements that a sales lead must meet to qualify as a potential customer.
  • Buyer persona: characteristic buyer qualities like behavior, demographic and unique needs.

As a result, a sales qualified lead has a higher probability of converting into a customer.

Here are some popular methods marketers and sales teams use to qualify leads:

  • Questionnaires.
  • Surveys.
  • Opt-in forms.

Qualifying leads will help boost your average conversion rates as it’ll save you time and effort from pursuing poor-fit leads.

3. Prospect Outreach

Once you qualify leads using your ideal customer profile and buyer persona, it’s time to reach out to them via sales calls, in-person meetings, or emails. Here, you discuss your business’s offerings and position them as solutions for the prospects’ unique needs.

Ideally, you should choose a mode of communication that is familiar and comfortable for your target audience. This will help you convey the message more effectively.

I recommend using email to reach out to prospects as it’s less intrusive, professional, and a cost-effective medium.

And with powerful email outreach and marketing automation software like GMass, you can:

Once a prospect indicates interest, you can further develop your relationship with them, send them a product demo, and move on to the next stage.

4. Proposal

If the demo goes well, your salesperson can submit a sales proposal — outlining how your business is uniquely positioned to tackle the prospect’s goals and challenges.

A typical sales proposal should provide detailed information on:

  • Scope of work.
  • Deliverables.
  • Associated costs.
  • Terms and conditions, etc.

You should aim to provide information that will aid the conversion of leads to customers.

5. Sales Close

The sales close is the penultimate sales pipeline stage.

You conduct negotiations with decision-makers, iron out the details, and close the deal here. The prospect you’ve nurtured makes the purchase, becomes your customer, and your business increases its revenue.

But if you genuinely want to improve your sales potential, there’s one more sales stage you need to address.

6. Post-sales Management and Retaining Customers

It’s not enough to simply close a deal — customers must also receive post-sales management. That’s why this stage of the pipeline is about retaining customers.

A great sales process will ensure that customers have a great onboarding experience and receive care and benefits that garner loyalty to the business.

Just like lead nurturing, it’s essential to reinforce relationships with customers, even if you’ve already won their approval.

For more information on sales pipelines, read my in-depth guide.

Go back to Contents

Now that we’ve explored the sales pipeline, let’s move on to the sales funnel.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

The sales funnel (sometimes also called the sales and marketing funnel) visualizes the customer’s journey or the buying process.

It’s the sales process from the prospect’s viewpoint and consists of stages that they go through — from becoming aware of a business to buying its product or service.

As a result, the funnel doesn’t look at the actions taken by a business or seller. 

Instead, it focuses on the number of leads and prospects at every sales stage. This helps you track conversion rates and identify areas of improvement quickly.

As a representation, it’s like a funnel chart or inverted pyramid, with the volume of leads decreasing as you go further down the funnel.

Here are the six common stages you can expect to see in a basic sales funnel:

1. Awareness

This funnel stage is where leads first hear about your business.

They could become naturally aware of a business through targeted marketing efforts or when they search for solutions to their pain points.

Some ways businesses can gain a lead’s attention at the awareness stage are through:

  • Social media and blog posts.
  • Product videos.
  • Advertisements.
  • Limited offers.

After entering the awareness stage, the impression you make will influence whether a potential customer will continue down the subsequent sales funnel stages.

2. Discovery

The discovery stage of the funnel has a greater potential for conversion.

It’s where a lead starts learning more about your business through an internet search, social media, or reading up on your website landing page. They begin to show more interest in your products/services if it’s relevant to their goals and challenges.

Publishing a white paper, utilizing SEO and SEM, curating educational content, or even creating a LinkedIn page can positively influence the discovery phase.

Note: The awareness and discovery stages are considered to be the top of the funnel.

3. Evaluation

At this funnel stage, a sales qualified lead views your services as a viable solution to their problems. They evaluate whether your product is a good fit by comparing your offerings with competitors.

In terms of the sales pipeline, this stage would come after you’ve qualified leads — when you start with outreach.

During the evaluation phase, you can engage with a prospective customer via a sales call, email, or sales meeting to help them understand how your business is uniquely positioned to solve their issues.

Here’s what can improve your standings during customer evaluation:

  • Word of mouth.
  • A detailed landing page.
  • Product reviews.
  • Influencer marketing.
  • Case studies.
  • Competitor comparisons.

4. Intent

At the intent stage, buyers are in a decision-making phase and intend to purchase your service or product.

It’s when your sales person submits a proposal, initiates negotiations, and finalizes costs and inclusions.

And if all goes successfully, you’ll have new customers. If not, you’ll have the opportunity to see what didn’t work and nurture those prospects to win them over in the future.

Note: The evaluation and intent stages usually form the middle of the funnel

5. Purchase

This stage is when you acquire a new customer — a potential buyer decides to go through with the purchasing decision and closes the deal.

Congratulations!
It indicates that your B2C or B2B sales strategy is working.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that your strategy is perfect.

An overview of how many prospects moved from the intent to the purchase stage, which you will find in a funnel report, will clearly show which stages in the marketing funnel need improvement.

6. Loyalty

Parallel to the retain stage in the sales pipeline, the loyalty stage is where you’ll see the effectiveness of your onboarding process.

Beyond securing new customers, it’s vital to ensure that they continue to receive value and benefits from your business. Features like loyalty programs, discount codes, and exclusive offers go a long way in fostering a deeper relationship and enabling customer retention.

Note: The purchase and loyalty phases are considered to be the bottom of the funnel.

Go back to Contents

By now, you may have a basic understanding of how sales pipelines and sales funnels are two different things.

But if you’re still confused about their differences, here’s a handy sales pipeline vs sales funnel chart to help you out.

Sales Pipeline Funnel: a Quick Comparison

Here are the key differences between a sales pipeline and a sales funnel:

Sales Pipeline Sales Funnel
Focus
  • Improving the sales process.
  • Improving the customer’s journey.
Purpose
  • Highlights the quantity and quality of leads generated in the sales process.
  • Highlights the efficiency of your lead generation and customer acquisition strategies.
Tracking
  • Tracks the active leads and deals in each stage of the sales process.
  • Tracks the conversion rate at each stage of the buying process.
Reports
  • Pipeline reports display lead activity across stages, which helps marketing and sales reps identify where to concentrate their efforts and resources to improve sales and pipeline velocity.
  • Funnel reports elaborate on the effectiveness of sales efforts at each stage, providing insights into the ROI (return on investment) at the sales stages.
Analysis
  • Sales pipeline metrics pinpoint weaknesses in the sales process — what stage is taking too long and where leads are getting stuck.
  • Funnel analysis pinpoints weaknesses in the customer journey — which areas are losing potential customers and need help.

Go back to Contents

But wait, do you really need a sales pipeline or a sales funnel?
Let’s find out.

Key Benefits of Sales Pipelines and Sales Funnels

Here’s a quick look at the benefits of the two models:

1. Sales Pipeline Benefits

According to a Harvard Business Review study, businesses with effective sales pipeline management display an increase in their average growth rate by 15%.

However, there are many more benefits to building a sales pipeline for your business, such as:

A. Comprehensive Lead and Deal Tracking

A pipeline helps businesses track every sales lead and deal in real-time.

It provides vital information on the value of leads at each sales pipeline stage and helps identify reliable sources for qualified leads.

B. Accurate Sales and Revenue Forecasting

Sales pipeline metrics offer information on how much business each sales rep generates.

Additionally, the data on closed deals allow sales leaders to determine the pipeline velocity (aka the speed at which leads pass through the pipeline) and accurately forecast the business’s monthly, quarterly, and yearly revenue.

C. Detailed Analysis of Sales Performance

Sales pipeline reports provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the sales process.

You can identify hold-ups in the pipeline, which help determine if your pipeline management needs to be improved or if a sales person needs additional help and sales resources.

Training a sales manager in pipeline management can help businesses achieve greater revenue growth and meet annual sales goals.

Let’s now move on to the benefits of sales funnels.

2. Sales Funnel Benefits

Both a B2C and B2B sales funnel will help you generate more leads.
Here’s an in-depth look at the key benefits of utilizing a sales funnel:

A. Gain Insights from a Customer’s Perspective

Sales funnels provide insights into the sales process from the customers’ point of view. This will help your sales manager identify obstructions or drop-off points in a buyer’s journey.

B. Accurate Tracking of Conversion Rates

Data from your sales funnel provides information on each stage’s conversion rate and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

These sales funnel metrics give sales managers valuable insights into what can help with the conversion of leads into customers and where changes need to be made.

C. Analysis of Low Performing Stages

A sales funnel report offers details on which sales process stages give a low return on investment. It helps sales leaders identify weak zones and determine if they need to review the effort a sales rep puts into that stage.

Go back to Contents

Now, you might be wondering: if both the sales pipeline and sales funnel are useful, which one should I use? Let’s find out.

Should You Use a Sales Pipeline or a Sales Funnel?

Generally, if you have an intricate sales process that needs to be optimized, a sales pipeline could be useful.

On the other hand, if you want your sales team or marketing team to increase conversion rates and be more customer-driven, you could use a sales funnel.

However, there’s more to it than just that.
Here are a few more things to consider when deciding which model is best for you:

A. You Need a Sales Pipeline if:

  • You want to see what parts of your sales process work and what doesn’t.
  • You want to streamline your sales process and identify hold-ups in conversion.
  • You want more detailed insights on the current deals.
  • You want to accurately forecast your sales revenue and meet your sales quota or sales goals.
  • You want to improve the performance of each sales representative.

B. You Need a Sales Funnel if:

  • Your business needs to be more customer-focused.
  • Your leading platforms for sales include e-commerce and social media.
  • You need to increase lead conversion.
  • You want to see which individual stages effectively convert prospects into customers.
  • You want to know when specific sales techniques are most effective.

C. You Need a Sales Funnel and a Sales Pipeline If:

If you want aspects from both models, such as a smooth sales process and an ideal customer experience, then you could use both.

Moreover, these sales concepts offer value that applies to more than just the sales team. The marketing team, product development team, and the whole business stand to benefit from it too.

Now, there’s no such thing as a pipeline funnel.
But it’s still possible to integrate both.

How?
You’ll need to connect the pipeline and funnel to your sales process with the help of a sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.

It will simplify the process of tracking active leads, sales performance, and conversion rates across different stages of your sales cycle. Moreover, it will make all your customer data accessible in one place.

You may also need additional sales reps to manage both a sales pipeline and funnel.

However, regardless of which model you choose, you need to optimize them to your company’s unique sales process. Only then can you reduce the churn rate (the rate at which you lose customers) and boost business revenue.

Go back to Contents

Final Thoughts

Whether your business focuses on B2B or B2C sales, optimizing your sales process is never a bad idea. That’s why it’s crucial to understand the pipeline funnel differences to determine what works best for you.

You’ll also need an actionable tool, like GMass or a sales CRM tool, to integrate and optimize your sales processes with ease.

For instance, GMass makes email marketing, sales email automation, and client outreach so much easier.

Why not try GMass today and see how it helps streamline your sales and marketing efforts?

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


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Email copywriting can take on many forms, whether it’s advertising a new product, recommending an existing one, or simply wishing customers a happy birthday.

However, writing an engaging email copy that gets recipients to take the desired action is no easy task.

To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of 15 amazing email copywriting examples you can get inspiration from. I’ll dive deep into what makes each marketing email work and how you can replicate these brands’ success for yourself.

Further Reading:

This Article Contains:

(Click on the links below to jump to a specific section)

Let’s get started.

12 Fantastic Email Copywriting Examples

Great email copywriting is at the heart of each email marketing campaign. And this includes everything from the subject line to the body of the email and the CTA button.

There are multiple ways you can craft a good email that your subscribers will respond to.

Let’s explore some of these below:

Note: All images have been sourced from reallygoodemails.com.  

1. Supergoop: Welcome Email

A welcome email gives the recipient the first impression of your business and sets the tone for all future communications they have with you.

In fact, 74% of all email subscribers anticipate receiving one right after they subscribe to your mailing list.

Often you’ll find welcome emails with offers and discount codes, like this email from Supergoop. This is a smart strategy as it opens a line of communication with the subscriber and gives them an instant reward for choosing your company over your competitors.

Subject Line: Welcome to the Bright Side

Supergoop

Like Supergoop, you can use the welcome email to explain how your business works, what you offer, and what subscribers can expect from any future correspondence.

The email further invites the subscriber to form a connection with the brand by offering a message from the CEO itself. This humanizes the brand and makes every new subscriber feel special.

2. Google Maps: Re-Engagement Email

While losing a certain amount of your email list due to attrition is understandable, losing too many readers can signal a problem with your email marketing strategy itself. For instance, if you don’t use personalization, subscribers might just delete your email without even reading it.

To avoid losing subscribers, you can send out re-engagement emails designed to bring them back. This can help affirm their membership with your company and boost your overall engagement levels.

For example, here’s a re-engagement email from Google Maps that tugs at the recipient’s heartstrings with a simple, high-quality picture.

Subject Line: We miss you on Google Maps

Google

The point of this email isn’t to overwhelm the reader with information but rather to bring them back to engage with you. And sometimes, the trick is to be simple and let the email body copy speak for itself.

3. Fitbit: Summary Email

Depending on your company and business model, you could send your subscribers daily or weekly summaries of their activities over a given period.

Providing a summary email tailored for each subscriber will almost guarantee they will open and read it — giving them an instant snapshot of their activity.

For example, Fitbit sends its subscribers a summary email detailing how many steps they took in a week.

Subject Line: Your weekly progress report from Fitbit!

Fitbit

In the above email content, the averages are easily visible, and the subscriber doesn’t have to scroll down to read it, making for a better reading experience.

4. KIDLY: GIF Email

GIFs make it super easy to communicate complex messages. They pique and capture the reader’s attention to help them focus on the core message of the email.

That’s why, in 2020, about 52% of email marketers used GIFs in their marketing emails.

While it ultimately depends on your brand voice, using GIFs in your email copy can actually improve engagement. Here’s an email marketing example illustrating that:

Subject Line: Black Friday: 6 awesome deals FTW 🎉

Kidly

You’ll find it difficult to focus on anything other than the GIF in the above email, which is exactly what the email copywriter intended. That, along with the pun, gives a fun spin to an already attractive sale message for a kids’ brand.

Still unsure how GIFs can improve email engagement?
Here’s some proof: in 2014, Dell used a GIF-centered sales email to launch their new product.

They received a:

  • 42% increase in click-through rate.
  • 103% increase in conversion rate.
  • 109% boost in revenue.

All of this just by using a GIF in their email!
If you want to experience a similar success story, I’d suggest incorporating a GIF now and then in your B2C and B2B email marketing messages.

Back to Contents 

5. Goodreads: Recommendation Email

Depending on your business, you can send your subscriber an email recommending them products similar to the ones they’ve shown interest in.

For example, the instant you mark a book as “Read” on Goodreads, it automatically sends you an email notifying you of the same and showing your review and rating (if you left one). They also give you a CTA button for following the author so you can stay updated on their newest releases.

Subject Line: You finished Musashi. What’s next?

GoodReads

This encourages email subscribers to go to the Goodreads app to read community reviews and explore the author’s other works, thereby improving engagement.

6. Puma: Birthday Email

The easiest way to ensure your recipient engages with an email is to make it entirely about them.

And there’s no better way to do that than by wishing them a happy birthday, like this email from Puma. You can even give the subscriber a discount code or a free gift to celebrate the occasion.

To make things simpler, you can create a birthday email template using bright colors and imagery, which you can customize on a recipient-by-recipient basis.

Subject Line: Happy birthday [recipient name]!

Puma

The purpose here is to make the customer feel connected with your brand and ultimately make a purchase that feels like a reward to them. Over time, your subscribers will expect birthday emails and specialized offers from you, creating a dependable relationship.

7. Masterclass: Email with Video

Did you know that B2B company Igloo Software boosted their email CTR by 189% in 90 days just by incorporating videos in emails? 

Many such B2B email marketing examples show that using videos is a great way to improve recipient engagement. It allows your subscribers to visualize what you’re selling them, making it seem more real and tangible.

For example, in this Masterclass video email, you get a taste of what you can expect when you download their app and sign up for the classes.

Subject Line: Three reasons to love our new app

Masterclass

Adding the word “video” in your subject line or preview text can also excite subscribers about what the email holds, improving open rates and follow-throughs on your CTA button.

8. Canva: Email Newsletter

Both B2C and B2B marketers often use newsletters to inform their audience of a new product launch, a recent blog post, sales offers, new landing pages, and other news.

For example, here is an email newsletter by Canva that explains how they now provide fun backgrounds you can use for your Zoom calls.

Subject Line: Did somebody say new Zoom virtual backgrounds?

Canva

Your email copywriter can make the newsletter more interactive by posing a question that subscribers can answer via your social media marketing channel or by commenting on a blog post.

Check out my related post on newsletter copywriting to learn how you can master it.  

Back to Contents

9. Forever 21: Personalized Email with Coupon

A personalized email is a specifically curated type of email that you send to increase recipient engagement.

It usually contains a recipient’s details such as their name, purchase history, wishlist, etc.

For example, this Forever 21 marketing email starts with a header announcing the brand is dropping the pricing for some of the email subscriber’s wishlist items. This is an effective email as it catches the reader’s attention and retains it by promising savings.

Subject Line: We saved these and got you 20% off

Forever21

Sending personalized emails is a must for any e-commerce store or retailer that wishes to grow its potential customer base.

But why?
Personalized marketing emails cater to the recipient’s specific interests and speak to them as an individual. Additionally, 72% of consumers said they would exclusively interact with personalized messaging.

That’s why I suggest you implement personalization in your email marketing strategy.

But how do you personalize each email?
By using an email marketing automation tool like GMass!

Used by copywriters, digital marketers, and other professionals, GMass lets you:

To start using this email automation software, just download the GMass Chrome extension and sign up for a free trial using your Gmail account.

10. Penguin Random House: E-commerce Email with Emoji

When writing emails, you must ensure it suits each recipient’s unique needs.

But that doesn’t mean your email marketing copy should be dull.

Email copywriters and marketers are increasingly choosing to add an emoji in their subject line and email bodies to stand out among the crowd. Doing this can also help your company come across as fun, casual, and with the times.

In this email marketing example by Penguin Random House, most of the email design consists of emojis — a fun way to increase subscriber engagement.

Subject Line: Guess the Book Titles Based on Emojis!

Penguin

Still not sure if you should use emojis?
Here are some more reasons to use emojis in your marketing copy:

Note: Using emojis ultimately depends on your audience and the type of business. For example, firms in the legal space would probably not use emojis as the subject matter is intense, and they need to reflect that image as well. 

11. Lush: Target Audience Email

This Lush email is a great example of segmenting your audience and targeting their specific pain points.

Here, Lush targets the parents of small children who went trick or treating during Halloween and ended up with a sugar rush.

Subject Line: Need to calm a sugar high?

Lush

Rather than have parents deal with kids staying up late, Lush’s marketing copy advertises some bath products subscribers can use to help children relax for bed after a night of trick or treating.

This email campaign shows that Lush understands its customer base and can create relevant email content for each segment of its target audience.

12. Netflix: Winback Email

This is a pretty cut-and-dry email from Netflix informing the subscriber their free trial to the service is ending.

However, they personalize it through the subject line by suggesting the subscriber continue this business relationship.

Subject Line: Your free Netflix trial is ending- let’s stay together

Netflix

The email copy is theatrical by using the phrase “end of an era” and the sign-off further personalizes the Netflix team by calling them the subscriber’s friends.

All of these small details come together to form a promotional email that’s:

  • Informative.
  • Casual.
  • Eye-catching.

Additionally, the core message is kept at the start so the reader can understand the email’s purpose even if they just glance at the notification.

It also creates a sense of urgency, prompting the potential customer to take immediate action as their free trial ends soon. And with a simple CTA button that asks you to check out all their offerings, Netflix also subverts the typical, straightforward CTA you might expect.

The result is a great example of a short and sweet email that implies what your next action should be without necessarily detailing it.

Wrapping Up

Writing emails with fantastic copy doesn’t have to be difficult.

You can easily replicate the B2C and B2B email marketing examples I covered here to create a suitable copy for your business needs.

And by using email marketing automation tools like GMass, you can streamline your efforts and receive actionable data on how each email marketing campaign is performing, allowing you to perfect the next one.

Download the GMass Chrome extension today and make your email copywriting irresistible to readers

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


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An email attachment is a great way to substantiate your message and provide more value to recipients through reports, contracts, case studies, and more.

But attachments email isn’t just writing ‘please find attached’ or clicking the paperclip icon to add your attachments. It’s much more than that.

In this article, I’ll tell you the exact steps to send the perfect attachments email and provide five solid examples to help you out.

I’ll also discuss five actionable tips to follow while adding an email attachment and share an excellent mail merge tool you can use for your attachment emails.

Further Reading:

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

Let’s go!

What Is an Email Attachment?

An email attachment is a file accompanying an outgoing email that provides additional content not covered in your email body. The extra information supplements your email, offering greater value and insights to your recipient.

You can attach multiple files to an email message, and the attachment file can be:

  • A PDF or Microsoft Word document.
  • Scanned files.
  • Spreadsheets.
  • Pictures.
  • Videos, and so on.

Go back to Contents

Next, let’s learn how you can write solid attachment emails in five simple steps.

How to Write an Email with an Attachment

Here are the steps to follow while composing an attachment email:

1. Identify the Files You Want to Send

Before drafting the email, you should know what files you want to attach to your message and where they are located on your device.

This will help you align the message body with the attachment and avoid scurrying around to locate the file last minute.

However, merely identifying these additional files isn’t enough.
You should also consider the potential consequences for your recipients.

What do I mean?
For instance, sending large attachment files that consume too much storage space or take too long to download can turn off recipients and reflect poorly on you.

Instead, you can:

  • Check if your audience is open to receiving your attachments email once you’ve established a connection. While cold emailing new leads, aim to build trust before sending any attachments — you don’t want to upset or overwhelm them with any unexpected attachment.
  • Verify the attachment’s file size and format to ensure they align with your recipient’s preferences.

More on optimizing attachments later in this article.

2. Craft an Email Subject Line

Once you’ve identified the required attachment files, you can begin drafting your email — starting with the subject line.

Since 64% of all readers open an email based solely on its subject line, you’ll have to create a killer subject line that intrigues your audience and reels them in.

And as most recipients tend to overlook unexpected attachment emails, it’s best to mention the file names in your subject line to give them a heads-up.

However, even while adding these details, remember to keep your subject lines concise and to the point, preferably under ten words.

Wondering how to write excellent subject lines?
Read my articles on:

Go back to Contents

3. Draft the Email Body

Once you have your subject line down, you can move on to the email body.

Your attachment email’s body should provide the recipient with everything you promised in the subject line. It’s here that you explain the purpose of your email.

If your sole intent is to send an attachment file, your email body can be a brief description of the file.

But if the attachment is only a part of what you wish to convey, simply mention it in the body with a short sentence like:

  • Here’s [attachment name].
  • I’m sharing [attachment name] with you.
  • The requested [attachment type – report/video/contract] is attached below.
  • Please take a look at the attached [attachment name].
  • For reference, I’ve appended [attachment name].

Pro tip: Strive to use something besides the generic ‘Please find attached’ when mentioning the attached files in your email’s body.

In addition to mentioning your attached files, your email message body should be compelling enough to interest readers. While drafting the body, you should:

  • Stay focused on your purpose.
  • Relay information through short, concise sentences.
  • Maintain a professional yet engaging tone.

Unsure about drafting the perfect email body?
Check out my articles on:

4. Add Attachments Files

Once you’ve composed your email, it’s time to attach the required files to your e mail message.

However, this isn’t a hard and fast rule.
You can actually attach your files whenever you want during the drafting process.

In fact, many senders prefer to attach files before writing their emails so that they don’t forget to attach them later.

But how do you add attachments?
If you’re a Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Mail user, attaching files to your message is pretty straightforward.

Here’s a quick walkthrough guide for Gmail (you can follow similar steps for any other email program):

  • Log in to the email server or email client on your desktop or mobile device and click on Compose or New Email option.
  • Click on the Attach File button (attachment icon/ paperclip icon) in the Compose window.

Attach file button

  • Select the files you want to upload and click Open to append the chosen file to your email.

Click open

5. Proofread and Send Your Email

You may have crafted an email with a great subject line and body and even attached the necessary files.

But don’t send it as soon as you finish.

Why not?
Because any minor, overlooked mistake in your email can make you look sloppy and amateur.

For instance, a missing comma, a broken link, or outdated stats can turn off your recipient — or worse, hurt your reputation.

That’s why you should always proofread and review your attachment email before hitting send. You should ensure your emails:

  • Don’t have any grammar or punctuation errors.
  • Are free of typos, broken URLs, or outdated information.
  • Are clear and easy to understand.
  • Address the appropriate recipient.
  • Contain the necessary attachments.

Once you’ve fixed such errors, you can send attachment emails that connect with readers and keep them engaged.

Go back to Contents

To help you further, I’ll share some examples illustrating different types of attachment emails.

5 Excellent Examples of Emails with Attachments

Here are five fantastic examples of emails with attachments, each serving a different purpose:

1. Submitting a Monthly Report

Subject line: Monthly Executive Reports for [month][year]… 

Hello [recipient’s name], 

It’s my pleasure to report that the previous month was one of phenomenal success, well beyond our expectations.  

Sales have peaked by [percentage] and are [percentage difference] above our target. Most of this increase is because of our new customer acquisitions. 

However, there’s been an increase in the churn rate too. We’ve lost [percentage] more buyers than last month. I think the nationwide lockdown could be the primary reason behind this. 

I’ve attached our executive reports with this email to help you analyze our performance for the past month.

Thanks.
[Your name]

2. Delivering an Event Invitation

Subject line:Invitation to [function or event name]

Greetings [recipient’s name],

I’ve enclosed an invitation to [function or event name] to be held in [place] on [date]. You’ll find the venue and time details in the invitation. I’ll be very grateful if you could attend the event.  

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any concerns. 

Regards,
[Your name]

3. Including a Contract Copy

Subject line:Your Contract Copy for [product or service name]

Hello [Recipient’s name], 

We’ve received your first payment for our [product or service] for [recipient’s company name]. I’ve included a signed copy of the contract document with this email for your record.

Please let us know if you need any further clarification. 

Best,
[Your name]

4. Follow-up to a Previous Message

Subject line:Ready to Start [recipient’s name]? Here’re Our Best Quotes

Hello [recipient’s name], 

It was great talking to you last time and learning more about what you’re looking for.  

I understand the issues you’re facing with [problems discussed in the previous conversation] and how it’s become harder to [effect on team or organization]. 

As discussed, I’ve attached a PDF file with more information about our services and the best quotes we can offer. You’ll find how we can help boost your [business objective] and resolve your specific pain points.  

For any further questions, please reach us at [contact details].

Thank you for your time,
[Your name]

5. Sending a Resume or Cover Letter

Subject line:Application for [job designation] – Resume and Cover Letter Included

Hello [recipient’s name], 

I’m interested in applying for the [job designation] position at your organization. I’ve attached my resume and cover letter with this email.

Thank you for considering my application for the role, and I look forward to your response. 

Yours sincerely,
[Your name] 

Go back to Contents

Let’s now look at some handy guidelines to follow while writing emails with attachments.

5 No-Nonsense Tips for Adding Attachments to Emails

Here’re are five actionable tips to enhance your attachment emails:

1. Ensure Your Attachment’s File Format Is Appropriate

A best practice when you send attachment emails is to ensure the file attachment is also accessible to your recipient.

What does that mean?
Just because you can access a file, don’t assume that your recipients would be able to do so too.

Sometimes your readers may not have the required software to open an attachment, leaving them disappointed and frustrated — defeating the purpose of your email.

To raise the odds of your recipient successfully opening the file attachment, you can:

  • Choose a file with a more universal file type they can readily open or download, like a .txt, .jpg, .docx, or .pdf file.
  • Avoid sending attachments with an unfamiliar file extension like .ade, .com, .exe, etc., that need specialized software for access or can raise suspicion among recipients.

2. Limit Your Attachment’s File Size

In addition to file type, your attachment’s size also affects the quality of your attachments email.

How?
Excessively large attachments, especially images, take longer to download and require more storage space. A large file is also more likely to be caught by spam filters and damage your reputation.

And to avoid an influx of large file attachments and spam, every email service provider has size limits for email attachments, such as:

  • Gmail: 25 MB
  • Yahoo Mail: 25 MB
  • Apple Mail: 20 MB
  • Microsoft Outlook: 10 MB

Restricting your attachment size to 10 MB makes it easier for readers to view and download your attachment, especially on mobile devices. If you want to attach multiple files, stick to the upper limit of your specific email service provider.

But what if you have to send a large-sized e mail attachment beyond those limits?
No worries!

Just compress your large attachments as per the limits of your email server or upload them to a cloud storage service like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox and share the link in your email.

3. Use a Link Instead of an Attachment

Remember, the file format and size restrictions for attachment files can often prevent you from sending them with your e mail message.

You may also prefer to avoid sending any unexpected attachment to new leads since you haven’t yet earned their trust.

What do you do then?
You can send a link to the file stored in a cloud service like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox) instead of sending an e mail attachment.

I’ll explain why.

Using a link (to a Google Doc, for example) has multiple benefits:

  • It can deliver the same content as an attachment file. For instance, you can share the contents of a Microsoft Word document or Adobe Reader PDF file in a Google doc.
  • It helps you overcome storage and time constraints — sharing a link is quicker and easier than spending several minutes uploading a large file.
  • Recipients can access it online via a desktop or mobile device.

But don’t just copy-paste a link into your email message!

To be professional, you can either:

  • Add a relevant anchor text describing your link’s contents.
  • Use a shortened link or try a URL shortening service like bit.ly to modify any lengthy links.

4. Send Secure Attachments in Your Email

In recent years, attachment emails have become popular channels for malware distribution, posing a massive security threat for recipients.

Sending a malicious or malware-infested file, even accidentally, can compromise your recipient’s email security and undermine your reputation.

But don’t worry. If you exercise caution while sending email attachments, you can save yourself and your recipients a world of pain.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Scan attachments for malware: Most email services automatically scan attached files and reject ones with viruses or malware. If your email client or service fails to do so, install an antivirus program on your computer to weed out virus-infested files.
  • Avoid attaching unknown file formats to your email: Steer clear of file extension types like .ade, .adp   .cmd, .com, .exe, .pcd, .wsf, etc., which are common malware carriers.
  • Stay away from attachment files with double extensions: Extensions like .img.exe are usually misused by hackers to conceal malware and viruses. Beware of any executable attachment file disguised as an image — it’s a common ploy to compromise recipients’ email security.

5. Mention Included Attachments in Your Email

I’ve already discussed the significance of mentioning the attachment’s details in your subject line and email body.

Doing so lets recipients know what to expect from your email message. It’s also an excellent way to be forthright and clear about the purpose of your email.

Some best practices to follow while referring to your attachments:

  • Tell recipients your attached file names.
  • Mention the number of attached files (in case of multiple attachments) and their variations.
  • Include some context or background information to give readers more clarity about the attached file.

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While you can apply these best practices for all messages with email attachments, you may not be able to follow them when sending mass emails with multiple attachments to different email addresses.

If you’re looking for enhanced mail merge capabilities for your attachment emails, an email automation tool like GMass is what you need.

The Best Mail Merge Tool for Attachment Emails in 2024

Gmass

GMass is a robust email marketing automation tool that lets you send mass emails and mail merges with personalized attachments. (You can even send attachments using the GMass API.)

Its exceptional features and ease of use make GMass the perfect outreach solution for digital marketers, salespeople, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. It’s also used by employees of social media giants like LinkedIn and Twitter.

With GMass, you can:

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Wrapping Up

Attachments add more substance to your emails and offer extra information to enrich your email message.

You can use the steps, tips, and examples I covered here to ensure your attachment emails deliver high value to your recipients.

And if you wish to send mass emails with attachment files, you should go for an email outreach tool like GMass. It lets you schedule mail merges with attachments, automate follow-up emails, track your email’s open, reply, and bounce rates, and do so much more.

Download the free GMass Chrome extension today and start sending email attachments at scale!

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