Now we have written a hack so that you can save your signature with GMass and so that your signature shows up every time a Compose window is launched, even if launched by GMass.
Saving your signature to GMass is easy.
Hit Compose to launch a new blank Compose window with just your signature.
In the To field, put “signature@gmass.co”. The Subject can be anything.
Then hit the GMass button to send it.
Compose a blank email, with just your signature, and send to signature@gmass.co with the GMass button (not the Send button). This will save your signature with GMass.
That’s all there is to it! An email will have been sent to signature@gmass.co, and your signature is now saved with GMass. Any time you use a GMass feature to launch a Compose window, including “Connect to Google Sheets”, “Build an Email List from Search Results”, or “Send a Manual Follow-up Campaign” (the three red buttons near the Search field), the Compose window will contain your signature!
Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge inside Gmail
Send incredible emails & automations and avoid the spam folder — all in one powerful but easy-to-learn tool
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
What do you do when you’re checking a campaign’s calendar view to see your auto follow-up schedule… and you spot someone on the list to receive follow-ups who shouldn’t be there?
I’ve suppressed 2 contacts, John Smith and Sally Johnson, as well as the entire uber.com domain. The domain and these addresses will not receive any more follow-ups for the campaign.
Open the Draft, click the GMass Settings arrow, and find the Suppression section under Advanced. Under the box labeled “Domains and email addresses”, you can add domains and email addresses to suppress for this campaign.
Another method: Dynamic lists
In April 2025, GMass introduced another way you can remove people from auto follow-ups: Dynamic lists.
When you make your campaign dynamic, it turns your Google Sheet of contacts into your single source of truth. So removing someone from the campaign or auto follow-ups is as simple as removing them from the Sheet.
You can see the technique in full detail here but in short:
Make your initial campaign dynamic by editing the email address GMass generates.
Delete people from your Google Sheet at any point if you want them removed from your auto follow-up sequence.
Why would you want to manually remove someone from an auto follow-up sequence?
Several scenarios come to mind:
The recipient called you instead of replying to your email. You wouldn’t want a sequence of emails designed to get a response to keep sending to this person if you’re already communicating by phone.
The recipient emailed you from a different address and started a new email conversation, which would prevent GMass from detecting that this person has “replied”, since he didn’t really “reply”.
The recipient engaged with you in some other way other than email or phone, so that you are now in active communication with your target prospect.
Why suppress an entire domain?
Note that you can add email addresses as well as domains to the Suppression box.
Suppressing a domain comes in handy when you’re sending cold prospect emails to multiple people at an organization, hoping that just one person will respond. After that one person responds and engages with you, that one person will already no longer receive follow-up emails, but you may wish to then suppress the entire domain to prevent follow-ups from going to that person’s colleagues.
Note: If you suppress a domain, GMass will make sure to suppress any emails at multi-part/subdomains as well. So if you suppress uber.com, GMass would also suppress emails to, say, john@ext.uber.com or john@mail.uber.com and so on.
This effect can also be achieved by enabling the “Domain matching” setting:
You can also suppress subsequent follow-ups within a campaign to addresses that are blocked.
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
With a recent increase in GMass’s popularity has come an increased number of reports of Google accounts getting suspended after having used GMass. In most cases it’s spammy behavior that leads to an account suspension. It’s important to note that:
GMass can’t control whether Google suspends an account, nor can it help re-activate a suspended account.
GMass is simply a conduit to unleashing the power and full sending capabilities of your Gmail account. GMass doesn’t have the ability to skirt Gmail’s rules or give you greater sending ability than you already have.
What happens when your account gets suspended or your emails get bounced?
We’ve found that there are different levels of bounces and blocking, ranging from Gmail bouncing your outgoing emails because Google determines they’re spammy to a suspension of an entire Google account.
At the most basic level, Gmail might bounce your outgoing email with this bounce message, when you try to send:
You may also see this warning the next time you log in to your account:
Lastly, if your account gets suspended, you may get this email sent to your recovery email account:
How do you prevent your account from getting suspended?
The basic rule to prevent your account from getting suspended is to not violate Google’s Terms of Service. These are some general guidelines that will help:
Don’t use GMass to send spam from your Gmail account.
Don’t set up a new Gmail account and immediately send hundreds of emails with it. Despite Google stating that you can send 500 emails/day from a regular Gmail account, you can’t do that from a new Gmail account that you created minutes ago. If that was possible, spammers would certainly take advantage by creating hundreds of Gmail accounts and sending 500 emails through each account.
If you’ve never sent a mass email from your Gmail account before, start by sending a lower quantity of emails and then ramping up.
We’ve found that Google Apps account have greater flexibility with sending than regular Gmail accounts. We’ve noticed that even a new Google Apps account has substantial sending ability, allowing almost the 2,000 email daily limit, whereas a new Gmail account won’t have immediate mass emailing abilities.
Ultimately each individual GMass user is responsible for his or her Google account. In most cases, if you’re a responsible sender sending emails to people who want your emails, you shouldn’t encounter any of these issues. Of course, there are exceptions. In rare cases, we’ve seen reports of legitimate senders getting temporarily suspended for sending a relatively low quantity of mass emails.
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
Overview
GMass is a unique service in the email marketing space because it’s built on top of Gmail. That means, unlike a traditional email marketing service like MailChimp, GMass doesn’t have any email sending servers or sending IP addresses. All emails are sent from our users’ Gmail accounts and therefore through Gmail’s IP addresses. The benefit of this is that your emails are sent through the world’s highest deliverability servers, since virtually nobody blocks Gmail’s IP addresses.
This, however, doesn’t mean that our users are immune to getting blocked. If the content of your email is deemed spammy, then Gmail itself may block your account, or your recipients’ email servers may block your emails.
GMass doesn’t monitor its users
GMass intentionally doesn’t monitor its users. Meaning, accounts don’t need to be approved before you can start using GMass to send an email marketing campaign. Why don’t we police our users? Because Google does most of the policing for us. If you use GMass to send spam, it’s likely that Google’s automated systems will be triggered and your Gmail account will be terminated. It’s unlikely that we’d be able to develop a better algorithm than Google already has in place for detecting and terminating spammers.
However, even Google’s spam detection mechanisms might not be fast enough in some cases. Lots of spammers succeed in using GMass to send some spam out before Google notices and terminates the associated Gmail account.
Your emails could be blocked
Because of that, it’s possible for your legitimate emails to become associated with a spammer’s emails and for you to also get blocked. How are your emails connected to the spammer’s emails? If you’re using GMass’s open tracking, click tracking, or unsubscribe features, then a “tracking domain” is inserted into your email to allow those features to work. If you’re using open tracking, then an invisible pixel is placed at the bottom of your emails, and the domain referenced is the tracking domain. If you’re click tracking your links, the links are altered so that the GMass server is hit first to record the click, and that’s done by way of the tracking domain. Unless you’ve set up your own custom tracking domain, GMass uses shared tracking domains across accounts. Typical shared tracking domains look like gmss1.com or gm.ag or gmss1.net. They are variations of the word “gmass” with the vowels removed, using various Top Level Domain (TLD) extensions from .ag to .net to .com.
Some spam filters catalog domains that are commonly found in spammy messages, so if your emails contain the same tracking domain as the spammer’s emails, then your emails can also get blocked.
This screenshot shows an example of the role a tracking domain plays in your GMass sent emails. In this case, the tracking domain “gm.ag” is used to track clicks of the reddit link.
The simple one-step solution
The solution is a simple one. Your accounts should use a tracking domain that is specific to just your email campaigns.
If you are able to add a DNS record for your domain…
That is the single most important step you can take to maximize your deliverability and avoid blocking issues.
And even better: GMass is one of the only email service providers that serves tracking links over HTTPS, rather than the less secure HTTP. That step will help improve your deliverability even more.
Re-sending your campaign to those that blocked you
After a tracking domain has been set on your account, you may want to resend your campaign to anyone that blocked you previously. Here is how to do that.
And of course, you can always use our Spam Solver tool to test your campaign before sending to see exactly where it’s headed. (And if the answer is spam, the tool will help you get to the inbox.)
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.
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
If you’ve sent an email campaign with GMass, or even a test message to yourself, never copy/paste that message from your Sent Mail or Inbox into a new Compose window.
Why?
Once the email is sent, elements of it are personalized to each recipient, like the unsubscribe link, the click-tracked links, and the open-tracking pixel. If you then copy/paste that email, which has already been tagged specifically for one recipient, into a new GMass campaign, then everybody that gets the new campaign will get an unsubscribe link that unsubscribes just that one email address, and links to click that will make it look like that one email address is clicking (not the actual recipient) and all opens will be registered to that one address.
In fact, this rule doesn’t apply to just GMass. It applies to any email marketing system, even traditional ESPs like MailChimp and JangoMail. If you use a traditional ESP to send yourself a test email, never copy/paste that test email back into a new campaign to send to hundreds of email addresses.
GMass is now preventing emails that contain already click-tracked links from being sent. If you copy/paste an old sent campaign into a new campaign and use the GMass button to send it, you may receive a yellow status message error that looks like:
You will also receive a report in your Inbox listing the offending links that need to be removed or changed.
How do you fix this?
To correct the issue, you’ll need to modify your links, so that they link to the actual website you wish to send your recipients to, rather than the GMass click-tracked URL. If you encounter this issue, a report will be sent to your Inbox listing the click-tracked URLs and the original URLs they should be replaced with.
In the Gmail Compose window, hover over each link and click it. Gmail will display its destination. Find the offending links, and modify them to point to the original URL.
How can I avoid this issue altogether?
For loading prior GMass content into the Gmail Compose window, use the Templates dropdown instead of copying/pasting content between campaigns.
See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass
Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge all in one tool — that works inside Gmail
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
It used to be that one of the must frustrating mistakes a GMass user could make was accidentally clicking the regular Gmail Send button instead of the GMass button.
Clicking the Gmail Send button by accident exposes members of your email list to each other and breaks personalization.
Numerous GMass users have at some point accidentally clicked the blue Gmail Send button when they meant to click the red GMass button.
The GMass Chrome extension now hides the regular Gmail Send button in certain situations and confirms intent in other situations.
Specifically, if there are more than 20 email addresses in the To field, or if there’s a GMass alias address in the To field, the Send button will be hidden.
If, however, you have more than one Compose window open, then the Send button will NOT be hidden. If the Send button is present, and you have more than 10 email addresses in the To field, and you click Send, you’ll get a popup asking if that’s what you really meant to do, with an option to cancel the send.
We attempt to hide the Send button because we assume that if you have more than 20 addresses, it is likely that you mean to use the GMass button to send individual emails to each email address rather than the Send button where all of the email addresses would be exposed to each other.
If, however, you want the Send button back after it has been hidden, you can easily make it re-appear. Just add the special email address ShowSend@gmass.co as the last address in the To field, and within a second, the Send button will re-appear and will remain in that specific Compose window.
You can then remove the ShowSend@gmass.co address if you wish.
Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?
GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
The default tracking domain that GMass uses for open-tracking, click-tracking, and the unsubscribe link for Google Apps users, gm.ag, was deemed suspicious by Google for a period of about 36 hours this past weekend. The domain has since been cleared and is now functioning properly, but there are some points to consider.
On Friday morning, May 27, several users reported that the domain gm.ag, was redirecting to a phishing warning page that looks like:
For GMass Google Apps users, gm.ag is the domain that is used inside your email campaigns to make open tracking, click tracking, and the unsubscribe link work. A different domain is used for regular Gmail accounts, so this particular issue only applies to Google Apps Users.
What does this mean?
It means that during the time that Google had gm.ag listed as suspicious, some links to gm.ag would take the recipient to the “Deceptive site ahead” page above instead of the actual URL. For GMass users, that means that links in email campaigns that have been click-tracked and unsubscribe links may result in your recipient being taken to this page instead of the intended page. From the “Deceptive site ahead” page, the user does have the option to proceed to go to the final URL.
The issue was temporary, and Google removed gm.ag from the suspect list as of Saturday evening May 28. As soon as we became aware of the issue, we took two steps:
We disabled the redirects from gm.ag to the specific phishing site in question and reported the corrective action to Google.
We switched the default tracking domain for Google Apps users from gm.ag to www.gmss3.net. It means that all campaigns sent after we made the switch would use www.gmss3.net, but all campaigns sent before the change will still have recipients clicking links that include gm.ag.
Why did this happen?
It happened because a single user, a phisher, used GMass to sending a scammy email, and activated click-tracking to obfuscate the destination URL. The destination URL, which Google determined was a phishing site, has since been removed from the Internet.
Why did GMass allow this phisher to use GMass?
GMass is not a traditional Email Service Provider like MailChimp or JangoMail, where a team of people approves and rejects accounts based on the user’s information. GMass is a fully automated system, and we intentionally do not police our users because:
We rely on Gmail’s own spam detection mechanisms to terminate users that are abusing GMass, and therefore abusing Gmail.
We could never build a better abuse detection system than Gmail already has. Gmail has been doing this for much longer than we have and has access to much more data than we do to make decisions as to whether accounts are legitimate or abusive.
I consider it one of the great benefits of GMass. For you the user, you get the world’s highest deliverability because your emails are being sent from Gmail’s email servers. For me, as an operator of an email marketing service, I don’t have to employ people to police users and approve/reject accounts.
What does this mean for me, a legitimate user?
It means you should take a step to isolate yourself from the behavior of other users. There’s only one step you need to take to protect yourself from the potential bad behavior of other users. You should set up your OWN tracking domain that is used in the open tracking, click tracking, and unsubscribe links. That way, instead of gm.ag appearing, your own domain will appear. Your own tracking domain can be a sub-domain of your organization’s domain. Click here to get started.
What about IP addresses? Do I need to make sure GMass’s sending IPs aren’t blacklisted?
No. GMass is built on top of Gmail, and all emails are sent from our users’ own Gmail accounts. That means that the emails are sent from Gmail’s own IP addresses, which are the highest deliverability IP addresses in the world. GMass is again different from a traditional ESP in this regard. A traditional ESP like MailChimp or JangoMail maintains its own sending servers and therefore its own IP addresses. They must police their users to keep their IP addresses clean. Because GMass is built on top of Gmail, however, we rely on Gmail to kick spammers off their network to keep their IP addresses clean, and they do an excellent job of this.
See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass
Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge all in one tool — that works inside Gmail
And… you can also personalize the CC and BCC fields. Meaning: You can have each individual message CCed or BCCed to one or more email addresses associated with each person you’re sending to.
Below, we’ll cover the ways you can use GMass for mail merge CC and BCC emails in Gmail.
Preparing your Google Sheet to Send Emails with Personalized CC and BCC
Here’s how to create your Google Sheet of contacts to include CC and BCC options.
Add a column for CC and/or a column for BCC after your email address column. Make sure your CC and BCC columns come after the email address column. GMass uses the first column of email addresses in a Google Sheet for the “To” field.
The CC and BCC columns are case insensitive. You can call the columns CC, Cc, cc, BCC, bCC, and so on. Case doesn’t matter. But other words do — so don’t call the columns something like CCaddresses.
Include as many emails as you want in the CC and BCC columns. In the past, GMass was only set up to allow for one CC and one BCC address per email. Now you can include as many addresses as you want for both. And you can separate the emails with a comma, semicolon, space, or any other non-email character.
Now you’re ready for your merge.
You Can Put Multiple Email Addresses in the CC and BCC Columns of Your Google Sheet to CC/BCC Multiple People
One frequent question we get is: Can I put multiple email addresses in the CC and/or BCC columns of my spreadsheet to CC and/or BCC multiple people?
The answer is yes, yes you can.
As we demoed in the example above, and you can see in this spreadsheet, you can include as many email addresses as you want in both the CC and BCC columns. Just separate the emails with a comma, semicolon, space, or any other non-email character.
Sending Your Mass Email with Mail Merged CCs and BCCs
Head over to Gmail and connect your Google Sheet to your new campaign. (If you are new to GMass and don’t know how to do that, check out our GMass quickstart guide to get rolling in a matter of minutes.)
You’ll notice the CC and BCC fields in your email are blank. That’s ok. GMass will fill them in later as long as you have them in the Google Sheet you connected.
That’s it. Your email is ready to go. I created drafts of mine so I could make sure the CC and BCC fields were all set.
And from the drafts, I can see everything matches my spreadsheet perfect. For example:
But What If I Want to CC or BCC the Same Address on Every Email?
The technique above works great if you want a different mail merge CC and/or mail merge BCC for every email on your list.
But what if you want to CC or BCC the same address on every email? For example, you use Salesforce and want to BCC your Salesforce email address on everything you send to log those messages? Or what if you want to include your same sales team member on every one of your emails?
You can do that with GMass — and don’t even need to get your Google Sheet involved.
Just add the “static” CC or BCC address in the Gmail compose window.
For example:
And here’s what those emails look like when I hit the GMass button to create drafts. Here are two of the drafts — you can see they’re both using the same CC and BCC addresses.
This technique also works if you’re sending emails with GMass and not connecting a Google Sheet. (For instance, if you just type addresses into the To field. Or if you generate lists from a Gmail search or label.)
How to blend “static” CCs/BCCs and mail merge CCs/BCCs
Putting this all together, you cansend emails with both static CCs/ BCCs and mail merge CCs/BCCs.
For example, let’s say you want to use personalized CCs on every email and CC your manager on all of them as well.
Connect your Google Sheet with the columns of CCs/BCCs. Type the static CC(s) and / or BCC(s) into their respective fields in the Gmail compose window.
Here’s a sample:
And here’s what one of the emails looks like when I create drafts. I have both static and personalized CCs and BCCs in this email:
CC and BCC with the GMass API
You can set static CC and BCC parameters when you create a campaign draft via the GMass API.
You can add your static CC and/or BCC address(es) as your parameters in the CampaignDrafts method. Those addresses will be CCed or BCCed on every email in the campaign.
And here’s the result in my Drafts folder.
You can now send the campaign using the Campaigns method in the API.
Mail Merge CC and BCC: Takeaways, and Personalizing Your Emails Even Further
If you’re still confused about CC and BCC and need a better understanding of how CC and BCC work in Gmail, please see my CC in Gmail guide and my BCC in Gmail guide.
Now that you know how to personalize the Cc and Bcc fields, you might also be interested in:
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
One of the most frequent emails I answer from users is:
I was testing your open-tracking, and I know that certain emails weren’t opened, but GMass still reports them as having been opened.
99% of the time this is because the user opened his own sent emails from the Sent Mail folder in Gmail. Doing so triggers the download of the open-tracking pixel, which is how GMass, or any email marketing system, knows if an email is opened. Opening the email up from the Sent Mail folder is equivalent to the recipient opening the email from his/her own Inbox. Additionally, if a particular email address bounces, and you open up the bounce notification, and the original email is underneath, then an open could be triggered also because you’re now viewing the original email underneath.
Another scenario: you set GMass to just create Drafts for a campaign rather than actually send the emails. You then open each Draft individually to customize it. GMass will count you opening the Draft as the recipient opening the email.
How do we solve this?
As of March 2022, we solved with our companion Chrome extension, Tracker Blocker. The extension will block “opens” from registering on your own emails. We also automatically remove opens from bounce notifications, even if you don’t have Tracker Blocker installed.
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.
We’ve seen bounces like this for both regular Gmail users and Google Apps users using GMass. The error is a non-standard bounce message that is specific to sending via the Google platform. What causes the error? Nobody is certain for sure, but the Internet speculates that it’s either one of the following:
The remote server is rejecting the email due to an SPF failure. This is applicable to Google Apps users that are sending from their own organization’s domain, not from gmail.com or googlemail.com.
The remote server is rejecting the email because Gmail’s sending IP is blacklisted, but Gmail doesn’t want the end user to know that’s the reason for the fail, so this generic message is delivered instead.
The SPF record for wordzen.com breaks the rules by requiring too many DNS lookups.
In the case of wordzen.com’s SPF record, the record includes permission for Google’s servers to send email for wordzen.com, but here’s an example of a domain of a GMass user where SPF doesn’t include Google’s servers at all:
If you still see this bounce notification after ensuring correct SPF settings, or if you’re not a Google Apps user, it could be issue #2 at play.
How is GMass handling these bounces?
Since GMass categories all bounces and replies for you, and builds an internal Bounce List for your account in order to suppress future mailings to bounced addresses, we’ve added these bounces to our “Bounce Exception” list, meaning we won’t count addresses that bounce with this message as a true bounce. That means that future attempts to send to these addresses will still work.
We’ve also deleted all bounces that were on your account’s Bounce List in the past because of this issue.
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
Automated email follow-ups in Gmail
The original email plus the automatic follow-ups that were sent one and five days later.
Overview:
Learn how to set automatic follow-up email campaigns to be sent after an email campaign is sent, to increase your response rates dramatically. Reminders will be sent to your recipients in stages until you get a reply (or an open or click). An essential feature for cold emailers!
An example: You send an email campaign to 100 warm leads from a trade show offering to set up a demo of your product. When you send that campaign, you set it so that two days later, a reminder is sent to anyone that hasn’t replied. Three days after that, another reminder is sent, and a few days after that, a final email is sent asking for a reply.
Gmail auto follow up using GMass
It’s easy to set up a Gmail auto follow-up using GMass, and you can try it right now using the standard follow-up language we’ve created. Just check the box next to each “stage” you want to be sent, make any adjustments to the timing and language, and hit the GMass button to send.
A demonstration of how to set automated follow-ups.
Testing your email sequence before you send it
You can easily test your sequence and see exactly what it will look like in the Inbox before you send.
Important points to know
You can use this feature for both mass emails and individual emails. If you’ve been using another Gmail tool, like Rebump, for follow-ups to your individual personal emails, you can eliminate that tool and use GMass instead to create automatic follow-ups.
You can choose behavior associated with the automatic follow-up. You can have the follow-ups sent to people who didn’t reply, or people who didn’t open, orpeople who didn’t click, or everyone (ALL). If you choose “Didn’t Open” as your follow-up action, fewer follow-ups will be sent because you will almost always have more Opens than you will Replies. If you choose “Didn’t Reply” as your action, more follow-ups will be sent because “Didn’t Reply” includes unread emails. Typically, cold emailers are seeking a reply to their campaign, so cold emailers use the “No Reply” setting most often.
Related to the behavior setting explained above, if you choose ALL, the auto follow-up stage will go to everyone in the original campaign, regardless of whether they replied, opened, or took any other action in response to your email. Additionally, whether the follow-up message goes out as a stand-alone email or as a message threaded to the same conversation as your original campaign depends on whether you set the content using the plain text box or choose a campaign from the drop-down list. If you type text in the box, then the email goes out threaded to the same email conversation you’ve already started with the prospect. If you choose a campaign from the drop-down, the subsequent emails are sent as stand-alone messages, meaning even the Subject set in that template will be seen by your recipient. When you choose a campaign from the drop-down menu, the sequence of emails goes out like a drip campaign, as if you wanted to send a training or introductory sequence of emails to your audience.
Use the power of this feature sparingly. You likely don’t want to configure automated follow-up emails with every campaign you send. This will cause your recipients to get a lot of emails from you, so you should only use this feature to send a follow-up reminder when you genuinely want a reply.
If you want your automated follow-up emails to include more than just plain text, you can add rich text the message to your follow-up emails. This is done by creating the auto follow-up message in the Gmail Compose window and saving it to your account, and then selecting “Send custom message…” and choosing the message from the drop-down menu. (You can also edit those messages.) You’ll also need to use this option if you want click tracking, as click tracking requires HTML.
You can also personalize your auto follow-up emails with personalization variables, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can use personalization tags inside an auto follow-up message. Either type them manually or choose them from the Personalization drop-down menu for easy pasting.
After you’ve launched a campaign with automatic follow-ups, you can edit or cancel the auto follow-up settings. Here you can also add auto follow-ups to a campaign after the fact if you forgot to do so when you originally sent it, but be careful. Changing the settings of an already-sent campaign of scheduled emails can trigger the sending of an immediate batch of reminder emails if you’re not careful with the settings. If you change your mind and now wish to prevent auto follow-ups from being sent, just set the “Days” to 0 for any particular Stage.
You can use this feature with or without Google Sheets. If you use it with Google Sheets, you can personalize your emails based on much more than just First and Last Name, which elevates your follow-up content from being an obvious canned response.
If you’re setting auto follow-ups based on replies, you can toggle a domain-match setting such that if anybody at a domain responds, all future follow-ups to everybody at the same domain will stop. See the auto follow-up domain match setting doc for more information.
Every campaign you send gets assigned a number called a Campaign ID. This ID is unique to your campaign and helps us identify your campaign if there are any issues. When we collect statistics on your campaigns, like numbers of opens and clicks, these are tied to your campaign by its unique ID. However, it’s important to know that each follow-up stage also gets assigned its own campaign ID. This is so that you can track the statistics by each individual follow-up stageand by the overall campaign at large. The campaign ID can be found in many places throughout your account, including the confirmation email you get after a batch of automated emails has been sent, the campaign report that goes into the GMass Reports–>CAMPAIGNS Label in Gmail, and your account dashboard.
GMass allows you to set a Reply-To address for a campaign, so replies go to a different address than the one from which you sent the email. GMass will not be able to detect those replies to the different address. So if you have an auto follow-up campaign set to send until you get a reply, using a different reply-to address isn’t a great idea. GMass will show you a warning if you set up a campaign that hits those criteria.
GMass auto-saves your settings, including auto follow-ups, as you work on them. So even if you close the settings box or close the entire email draft, your auto follow-up messages and settings will be there when you re-open.
To “signature” or not to “signature?”
‘Tis the question. You can use the special variable {mysig} inside the text boxes to insert your Gmail signature when the follow-up email is sent. For example, your Stage 1 auto follow-up could look like this:
Add the {mysig} variable and GMass will insert your Gmail signature when the follow-up email is sent.
Should you include your signature in each auto follow-up, even though your signature will still be visible at the bottom of the thread? The jury’s still out on that. For the first few years of our existence, we didn’t provide the ability to include a signature in a text-based Gmail auto follow-up. Of course, if you’re using rich content by choosing a template from the “custom message” drop-down, those messages were likely to include your signature since you created them in separate Gmail Compose windows, and Gmail inserts the signature by default when you launch a new Compose window. Still, it’s a question of whether the prospect receiving your subsequent emails needs to see your signature immediately below each follow-up email and also at the bottom of the thread after the original campaign message.
GMass provides default text in each stage that you’re free to use, but we don’t include the {mysig} variable by default. You can add that if you wish, though.
How the timing works
The timing of a follow-up reminder is based on the time that each individual email in a campaign was sent, not when the campaign was launched. Example scenarios:
The Days for each Stage are based on the time the original email is sent, not when the prior Stage was sent. For example, if Stage 1=2 Days, and Stage 2=5 Days, then Stage 1 will send 2 days after the original email, and Stage 2 will send 5 days after the original email, not 5 days after Stage 1 is sent. (There is a bit of an exception to this though — see the section below on the “Strict count of days between stages” setting.)
If you create your campaign on Monday, but schedule it to be sent on Wednesday, with the first stage follow-up scheduled two days later, then the first follow-up to the non-responder will be sent two days from Wednesday, meaning Friday.
If you create a campaign on Monday and use the “spread out” feature to send 100 emails/day for three days, and you include a Stage 1 follow-up going two days later, then each non-responder will get his first follow-up two days after his original email was sent. So for the 100 emails on Monday, the follow-ups will be sent on Wednesday. For the 100 emails sent on Tuesday, the follow-ups will be sent on Thursday, and so on.
You can also set the Time of Day for an auto follow-up sequence to go out. Without a time, the auto follow-up will go out on the exact 24-hour interval, based on the number of “days” you’ve set. With a time, the auto follow-up will go out after the specified number of days and at the specified time on that day (as long as we can send within 3 hours of the expected send time). Days and times are considered a pair. So for instance, if the expected send time is Wednesday at 11:30 PM, GMass will send follow-ups as long as it’s before Thursday at 2:30 AM.
Set the specific time of day the follow-up emails should be sent.
If you use the “Just create drafts” option on your campaign on a Monday, but then wait to click the link to have the drafts sent until Tuesday, the timing of the automatic follow-ups will be based on Tuesday because that is when the Drafts were sent.
If you enable the Skip Weekends option, then an auto follow-up will never get sent on a weekend, and the different Stage setting for Days become business days, not all days. Monday through Friday are business days. For example, if your original campaign sends on Wednesday and has a Stage 1 follow-up set to 7 days, and you enable Skip Weekends, then the Stage 1 follow-up will send 9 days later on the following Friday, since that Friday is 7 business days after that Wednesday.
You can schedule the emails to go out as much as 1,000 days apart.
How the timing works if a campaign is paused/delayed (for various reasons) when an auto follow-up is scheduled
Sometimes there are exceptional circumstances that affect the timing of auto follow-ups.
There are three primary situations when this happens:
You pause a campaign and its auto follow-ups. Then you resume the campaign later, after an auto follow-up was scheduled.
You run an A/B test with a long decision window, which delays the timing of some of the emails in your campaign and their follow-ups as well.
You hit Gmail’s daily sending limits, which prevents follow-ups from going out at their scheduled time.
We’ve built in workarounds for these scenarios to make sure everyone still gets the auto follow-ups they’re supposed to get — but there’s some math involved.
Here’s an example scenario to illustrate how it works.
Let’s say you have a campaign with a Stage 1 auto follow-up scheduled for day five a Stage 2 auto follow-up scheduled for day eight.
But… you paused the campaign on day four. And you resumed the campaign on day seven. That means those Stage 1 follow-ups didn’t go out on time. (And GMass won’t send someone Stage 2, Stage 3, and so on if they don’t get Stage 1.)
So in this case, Stage 1 will now go out after you resume the campaign on day seven.
And if you had a time set, say 2:00 P.M., the follow-up go out at that time on the day you resumed the campaign. (If you hadn’t had a time set, the follow-up would go out immediately once you resumed.)
And GMass will also make sure to keep the same time distance between your auto follow-ups from then on.
So since Stage 2 was scheduled for day eight, GMass won’t send it one day after the now-rescheduled Stage 1. GMass will calculate the difference between those two follow ups (Day 8 – Day 5) and send Stage 2 three days later.
This system makes sure everyone gets your follow-up sequence as intended, regardless of what kind of intentional or unintentional delays may come up.
The “strict count of days between stages” setting
By default, GMass auto follow-up send dates are calculated relative to the initial campaign date.
However, you might want to make sure your follow-ups are sent relative to each other. For instance, you want to make sure stage 2 goes out three days after stage 1.
Normally, that will happen. But there are potential exceptions where it wouldn’t.
For instance, let’s say you send a campaign on Monday and have stage 1 at 2 days (Wednesday) and stage 2 at 5 days (Saturday). But…
Scenario 1: You manually send stage 1 early on Tuesday, after just 1 day. Stage 2 would still go out as scheduled after 5 days, on Saturday. That means there’s a four-day delay between the stages, not the initial three-day delay.
Scenario 2: Your initial campaign goes out Monday. But when it comes time for stage 1 on Wednesday, your account hits Gmail’s daily sending limit. So some of your stage 1 messages go out Wednesday, but some go out Thursday. Then, when Saturday comes, you don’t hit any limits so all of stage 2 goes out. That means for some people (the ones who got stage 1 on Thursday), there’s a shorter-than-intended gap between stage 1 and stage 2.
If you want to avoid these (and similar) scenarios, you’ll want to use the GMass setting to keep a strict count of days between stages.
Go to the GMass dashboard > Settings > Auto Follow-ups. Then check the box next to Strict count of days between stages.
Now, with this setting turned on, your follow-ups will maintain their prescribed cadence. So if stage 1 is two days and stage 2 is five days, those stages will always go to a recipient three days apart — no matter what happens with delays or anything else.
Re-examining the two scenarios I laid out earlier, here’s how those would be different with Strict count of days between stages turned on.
Remember, in this scenario you send a campaign on Monday and have stage 1 at 2 days (Wednesday) and stage 2 at 5 days (Saturday).
Scenario 1: You manually send stage 1 early on Tuesday, after just 1 day. Stage 2 would now go out on Friday, rather than the initial Saturday, to maintain the three-day spacing between stage 1 and stage 2.
Scenario 2: Your initial campaign goes out Monday. But when it comes time for stage 1 on Wednesday, your account hits Gmail’s daily sending limit. So some of your stage 1 messages go out Wednesday, but some go out Thursday. Now, everyone who got stage 1 on Wednesday gets stage 2 on Saturday — but everyone who got stage 1 on Thursday gets stage 2 on Sunday.
One thing to note: “Strict count of days between stages” is an account-level setting, not one you select on a campaign-by-campaign basis. You can turn it on and off in your dashboard, however do know it will apply to all campaigns while it’s on.
What counts as a reply?
We’ve refined our algorithm that detects replies to an outreach campaign by poring over thousands of sample emails. Our reply detection mechanism is now fairly accurate but isn’t 100% perfect.
Generally speaking, an email is only counted as a reply if it’s a legitimate reply from a person and not a bounce or an out-of-office auto-reply. An email has a much higher chance of being counted as a reply if it appears as a reply to the same conversation thread in Gmail. Out-of-office auto-replies usually arrive as part of a separate thread, and not part of the original thread, so this is what prevents them from being counted as a reply.
And as we mentioned earlier, if you use a different Reply-To address for your campaign, GMass won’t be able to detect replies to that other address.
Images in follow-up emails
If you use the rich text content option for your Gmail auto follow-up sequences, then any images you insert into the Compose window when creating the content for your follow-up stages will also be preserved. There was a time where images would “break” when the actual follow-up email was sent, but as of April 2020, that issue is fixed. The reason the images would sometimes break is that Gmail inserts images as embedded images rather than hosted images when you use the standard “Insert Image” icon in the Compose window’s toolbar. Embedded images are images where the full content of the image is part of the email message, rather than being hosted on a web server somewhere.
Attachments in follow-up emails
Whether you include attachments in the original email or any of the subsequent follow-up stages, they are handled properly and in a manner that we think optimizes the experience for your recipient. The rules for attachments in auto follow-ups are as follows:
Any attachments that are part of the original email will be sent as part of the original email, just as you’d expect.
If you set rich a text follow-up stage that also has attachments, when the follow-up email goes out, it will go out with that specific stage’s attachments.
If a follow-up stage does NOT have its own attachments, then the follow-up email will still be sent with the attachments from the original email message.
For example, let’s say your original email contains the attachment “Document.pdf.” Your Stage 1 auto follow-up is just the text “Hey, just making sure you saw this.” When that follow-up email goes out, it will still contain the attachment Document.pdf.
If, however, your original email contains the attachment “Document.pdf,” and you set your Stage 1 auto follow-up to be a rich text message with the attachment “Proposal.pdf,” then that Gmail auto follow-up email will go out with just Proposal.pdf and not Document.pdf.
Why this behavior?
Technically, we’re breaking the rules of how follow-up email replies work. If you send a regular email to someone with an attachment (by using the regular blue Gmail Send button), and then after a few days of no reply, you retrieve that email in your Sent Mail, click Reply, and type a follow-up on top of your original email, that follow-up would NOT contain the attachment from the original email (unless you re-attached it). However, we think there’s a benefit to re-sending the attachments with each Gmail auto follow-up sequence unless the sequence contains its own attachments.
Reports
When you download the Main Campaign Report CSV file for any campaign that has auto follow-ups, you get additional columns that reveal a “matrix” of the various auto follow-up stages, and which recipients have so far received which stage of follow-up.
The main campaign report CSV showing auto follow-up stages
This is especially useful if you have an automated campaign or a distributed campaign sending a certain number of emails/day. You can easily see who has received the original email, who has received each of the various auto follow-up stages, and how many days ago each follow-up stage was sent.
This report is accessible by clicking the “download main campaign report” link from any report under the GMass Reports–>[CAMPAIGNS] Label in your Gmail account.
What you see and what your recipient sees
Your recipient will see your follow-up emails on top of the original and part of the same conversational thread.
You will see the follow-up emails as part of the same email thread in your Sent Mail folder, and each consecutive follow-up reminder will include the original and any previous reminders below.
The idea is that a follow-up email looks just like it would if you had found the original email from your Sent Mail, hit Reply, and then typed a new email on top and hit Send.
Understanding why someone is in one stage but not in another
Each time a sequential stage of a campaign goes out, a complex set of rules determines exactly who gets that sequence. If your sequences are based on “replies”, then it’s easy to think that Stage 3 should go out to everyone in the campaign except the people that replied to Stage 2, but it’s actually more complex than that. When a particular stage sends, here’s how the list of recipients is compiled:
First, the list of people in the original campaign is compiled.
Then, a list of people that have replied to all prior stages is compiled, and that list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Then, the account’s unsubscribe list is compiled and that list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Then, the account’s bounce list is compiled and that list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Then, the campaign’s suppression list is examined, and anyone on the campaign-specific suppression list is removed from the recipient list for the current stage.
Timing can also play a factor. It’s easy to think that if I send a campaign to 100 people, and also have 3 stages set up, that if 10 people reply to the original campaign, that 90 people will now receive Stage 1. And that if 5 people then reply to Stage 1, then 85 people will receive Stage 2. But, what if in between Stage 1 sending and Stage 2 sending, 2 more people reply to the original campaign? Then, those 2 people will also be eliminated from Stage 2. Or, what if in between Stage 1 and Stage 2 sending, 1 person unsubscribes from a campaign that you sent them 3 months ago. Then, that 1 person will also be eliminated from Stage 1. Finally, let’s say someone replies to Stage 1 but still receives Stage 2. How did that happen? It’s possible that the person replied to Stage 1 after Stage 2 had been sent!
And when you want to see who’s getting what messages and when…
Calendar view for your past and upcoming auto follow-ups
It can be tricky to keep track of when your auto follow-ups are scheduled to go out, especially if:
You’re dealing with a recurring campaign that’s starting the sequence for different recipients at different times.
With the calendar view, you can see when auto follow-up stages are scheduled to send (in your local time zone) — and who will receive them. You can also see all of the past auto follow-ups sent for the campaign.
The calendar view takes your sequence cut-off triggers into account; for instance, if you stop the sequence when you get a reply, the numbers for future sends will reflect that. (And, when you get more replies, those numbers will go down.)
To access the calendar view of your auto follow-ups, head to the GMass dashboard. You can see which campaigns have auto follow-ups with the calendar icon.
When you click the calendar icon, you’ll see a report showing you past and future auto follow-ups for the campaign.
Past sends are in orange; today’s send is in green; future sends are in blue.
You can click any number to see a full list of the email addresses who will receive or received that follow-up. And you can download a CSV of those addresses.
If you spot someone on one of those lists for future sends and don’t want them to get the follow-up, a super quick way to remove them is to add them to the campaign’s suppression list.
Go into Gmail and find the draft of the campaign. Open the GMass settings, and head to the advanced section.
In the Suppression area, enter that person’s email address. Then click the green SAVE Changes button.
Beware of these dangers
The sending of auto follow-up emails is dependent upon certain factors, like being able to locate the original “sent” email in your Gmail account. Beware of these dangers which can lead to auto follow-up mishaps:
Do not delete the original campaign from GMass Reports –> Sent Copies.
Doing so will prevent your auto follow-up emails from sending because GMass relies on finding the original campaign to construct the auto follow-up.
Do not delete the individual sent emails from your Sent Mail folder.
Doing so will also prevent auto follow-up emails from sending because GMass won’t be able to find the original sent email to add the follow-up to it.
Do not add the “GMass Reports –> Replies” Label manually when replies to your campaign arrive in your Inbox.
GMass will automatically apply this Label to replies. If you manually apply this Label, GMass will skip the message and be unaware of the reply, and then an auto follow-up will go out to someone that has already replied.
Did your auto follow-ups fail to send? You can send it manually
If your auto follow-up email sequence didn’t send for some reason, whether it’s your fault or ours, you can manually send a one-off follow-up email that will still be part of the same email conversation as the original email. Here’s how to do it.
First you’ll need to create a CampaignDraft of the initial campaign (and get the campaignDraftId).
Then, in the Campaigns method, you can set up your auto follow-up sequence using the stage options.
stageOneDays, stageTwoDays, and so on with other stageNumDays: Number of days before the stage is sent
stageNumCampaignText: Text to use for plain text follow-up
stageNumCampaignId: Campaign ID of rich text follow-up message. If you’ve specified both a text and campaign ID follow-up, GMass will use the campaign ID.
stageNumAction: Determine what recipient (in)action leads to this stage.
r: No reply
o: No open
c: No click
a: Send to everyone, regardless of the actions they’ve taken on any prior email in the sequence
stageNumTime: Time of day the follow-up should go out.
And now I can go to my Gmail drafts folder, find this campaign, and check the settings to see it’s all set up correct.I can also send myself a test of the entire sequence to double check.
You can use the auto follow-up settings to create a traditional drip email campaign as well. For example, if you want a series of 8 emails to go out in a timed manner after someone signs up on your website, you can do that.
The GMass campaign DRAFT must exist in your account under the GMass Auto Follow-ups Label to edit or delete auto follow-ups. If you accidentally deleted the DRAFT, try restoring your DRAFT.
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.
