
Sending personalized mass emails can seem like a daunting task. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll waste hours of time manually crafting emails one by one for meager opens and non-existent conversions.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In this blog post, we will discuss a simple but effective process that I have developed over years of trial and error to send personalized mass emails that convert. We’ll talk about how you can use email marketing tools to set up drip campaigns and insert personalized elements so you can send emails to thousands of contacts that also have a personal touch.
Stick around to the end to learn my top tips for making sure your emails get opened!
What are Personalized Mass Emails?
Personalized mass emails involve sending hundreds or thousands of the same email but each email is slightly tailored to the recipient. Slight changes in the content of the email give the appearance to the recipient that it was personally sent to them and no one else.
Different elements that can be personalized in a mass email include:
- name
- company name
- address
- phone number
- title
- industry
- offer
- and more
With modern marketing tools such as sales prospecting tools, sales engagement platforms, and email marketing software, you can add any custom fields that you want to your email template.
Reasons You Need to Know How to Send Personalized Mass Emails
Sales prospecting involves reaching out to enough potential customers to fill up your sales pipeline. The outreach process can take lots of time and money in the form of labor costs to complete. Some estimates place the average cold email response rate at about 1%. That means you’d have to send 100 emails to get one response – and even that response might not lead to a sale!
There are two ways to get more leads from cold email outreach:
- Send more emails
- Increase the response rate.
This is where personalized mass emails come in. Data suggests that average response rates go up to 17% for personalized emails.
Combine personalization with a sheer mass of emails sent, and you have a prospecting strategy that will provide a stream of healthy leads to your sales pipeline on a consistent basis.
Step-by-Step Instructions to Send Personalized Mass Emails
Sending personalized mass emails is really not difficult with the right tools and once you know what you’re doing. After sending tons of successful email campaigns over the years, I’ve developed a 5-step process to make email marketing easier.
Follow this simple but effective process to maximize email delivery, get more email opens, and make far more money than you could if you did this all manually.
Step 1: Build a Highly Targeted Prospect List
Your prospect list is a highly curated list of people with personal information included. Building this list is really the key to sending personalized emails that get results.
The easiest way to build a prospect list is to use a well-established prospecting tool. These tools harbor millions of potential selected contacts and their personal information. Check out our list of the top prospecting tools, choose one that fits your business goals, and sign-up for an account to get started.
For the technical details on how to actually pull mailing lists and clean the data, check out this article on how to build a highly targeted prospect list.
Once you have a list of contacts with their personal details in a spreadsheet, you’re ready to upload.
Step 2: Upload your Prospect List onto Your Email Marketing Platform of Choice
Take your prospect list spreadsheet and upload it onto your email marketing platform. I like to use a platform called Sendinblue. It has everything your need to send personalized mass emails while still being easy and straightforward to use.
Checkout this article about the best email marketing software for e-commerce to learn more about Sendinblue and other email marketing platforms.
Step 3: Create an Email Marketing Campaign

Use a dedicated email marketing service platform to build an email campaign for your intended audience. Sendinblue makes this super easy by walking your through every step in the process:
Name the Campaign

Name it something that indicates what your campaign is about, who you’re sending it to, and when you built it. As you build more of these, it’s important to keep organized.
Choose a Template

Most email marketing platforms have preset templates to choose from. Sendinblue has some good starter templates and a very intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Choose something that has a good layout for presenting info in the body of the email.
Choose Sender and Recipients
Your sender should ideally be the email address associated with your website domain. This gives your email campaign a more professional feel than a free gmail address.
For the recipients field, simply choose the beautiful list that you uploaded to the platform earlier on.
Step 4: Add Personalized Attributes to the Email Template

This is where things get fun – add attributes throughout the email that give it a personalized look and feel. Once these attributes are in place, the email marketing platform pulls the information from each contact under the associated field.
For example, if you include the “FIRSTNAME” attribute somewhere in the email template, the platform will replace the attribute with the contact’s actual first name when it sends out.
Make sure you include personalized attributes in a clear subject line, the preview, and the main body of the email template. In fact, try to include as many attributes as you can while still keeping it natural.
Incorporating distinctive and customized features into your emails can greatly increase both opens and conversions.
Step 5: Schedule Your Email Campaign to Send
Once you have your email campaign sent and have the proper attributes included throughout, schedule the campaign to send out to your recipients.
It’s very important to schedule the email campaign to send out gradually over time instead of all at once. This is because most email service providers keep track of email-sending patterns to try and reduce spam for their users. If you send out a ton of almost identical emails at once, your email address will likely get flagged, and your emails will go straight to the spam folder.
To avoid spam filters, only schedule out 50 emails per day for a new email address domain, and slowly work your way up to about 200 emails per day over time.
Email service providers will start to trust your domain over time so a gradual approach like this will reduce the likelihood that your account will get flagged.
Tips For Successfully Sending Personalized Mass Emails
The keys to sending out great cold email campaigns en masse are as follows:
Build a highly targeted list with complete data
As we covered earlier, a great mass email campaign starts with a good list. If you pull an incomplete or irrelevant contact list, the whole personalized aspect of the campaign starts to break down.
Remember to always go through your contact list before uploading it to take out irrelevant or incomplete contacts, make sure information is under the correct headers in the spreadsheet, and manually add any additional information that needs to be in there.
A clean, pared-down prospect list will easily upload into your email marketing platform, making the whole process much smoother.
Add personalized attributes to the email template frequently and naturally
Personalization supercharges your emails. As we already established, response rates go up tremendously when personalized information is included in emails. This stands to reason as most people have a deep desire to feel seen and heard. In the same way that personalization attracts attention and inspires action, cold generic emails come off as slimly and salesy.
Take advantage of your ability to add names, company names, pain points, titles or contact info to emails as much as possible to better communicate with your target audience.
Schedule your email campaign to send out over time
Proper email scheduling ensures that your emails reach the recipient’s inbox while avoiding the spam box. This is one area where you want to tread lightly before you hit send. Once your domain has been flagged by email services providers as a spam account, it can be very hard to get back in their good books.
As recommended in step 5 of the email marketing process, make sure that you start slow (around 50 emails per day max.) and work your way up to full scale (around 200 emails per day).
Taking it to the Next Level: How to Make Sure Your Emails Get Opened
It’s super important that your emails get opened because if they don’t, you certainly won’t get any sales. The subject line and the preview section are the most important when it comes to email open rates.
Here are a few tips to write killer headers and previews:
- make them eye-catching and interesting -> when people are skimming through their email boxes, you have a second or two to catch their attention. CAPITAL lettering, power words like sensational, remarkable, or instantly, and action words like “act now”, “be sure to” or “check out” can make your subject lines and previews stand out from the email box riff-raff.
- Include personalized email elements -> in addition to adding the personal attributes already discussed in this article, try to speak directly to the contact. Writing like you’re talking to a friend comes off much better than writing generic sales pitches. For example, “FIRSTNAME, I had to let you know about…” sounds better than, “Find X item enclosed…”
- Provide Value -> always phrase your email subject lines and previews in a way that focuses on the recipient’s issues and how to solve them. Dale Carnegie’s classic book, How to Win Friends & Influence People hammers this point home. The basic idea is that people are much more likely to pay attention when they are the topic of focus. For example, starting an email with “Your company’s X problem now has a solution…” would be much more effective than “Here’s the solution that I provide…”. Both phrases talk about a solution, but only one focuses on the subject’s personal problem.
Wrapping Up and My Experience With Personalized Mass Emails
Like most things in digital marketing, sending personalized mass emails is not complicated but it can be hard. If you don’t know the ins and outs of the process, you’ll likely spend hours sending emails manually, sending emails that don’t get opened, or even getting your domain flagged as a spam account.
Hopefully, this article has given you the information that you need to avoid the common pitfalls of mass emailing. Unfortunately, I had to learn some of these lessons the hard way over the years.
My goal with creating this simple 5-step process was to give you a roadmap to high deliverability, massive open rates, and conversions straight out of the gate. For any questions about mass email campaigns, please reach out. Until next time, happy sending.