Targeted, bulk email marketing is one of the best methods of scaling lead generation. It has been proven-effective in gathering marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) faster than other content. But to the newcomer, it can seem like a lot to understand. Let’s simplify it.

First off, it’s important to differentiate between opted-in and cold email marketing. We’re talking about cold contacts – that is, people who’ve never heard of you.

Bulk email is a numbers game. You establish your audience, introduce your business and communicate its value. Done effectively, you can create new leads for your business.

With that in mind, let’s put things into perspective. For an opted-in list, open rate is likely between 20% and 40%. That’s because your subscribers have enrolled in your content at some point where you offered them some value.

Strong cold email offers that value at the top of the funnel. Since you’re new to your audience, you can’t anticipate the same open rates as with an opted-in list. 3-5% open rate is excellent for cold email.

Some marketers see this open rate and decide that cold email isn’t for them. The key here is list quality, audience volume and smart emailing. And we can help you with that.

So Why Choose Bulk Email Marketing?

If we’re talking about a tenth of the open rate, then you’ll get a tenth of the leads, right? Well, no – it’s a matter of scale – you send emails in bulk, meaning your recipient list is going to be much larger than with your opt-in list.

Let’s run a quick comparison of the two. We’ll say the open rates are average: 25% for opt-in, 2.5% for cold. The maximum number of emails you can send daily from most opt-in email providers is 1,000, so we’ll use that. Our list size for bulk email will be 100,000 – though you could easily send to double, triple or even ten times that many contacts if you desired.

As you can see, even with one-tenth the open rate, bulk email marketing generates 10 times the number of opens that opt-in does. And the larger your recipient list is, the more leads you generate.

As with an opted-in list, it’s important not to over-send to your cold contacts. Space out your emails to avoid audience fatigue and a spike in unsubscribe rates.

With testing and experimentation, you should be able to send using a cadence that directly appeals to your audience.

	Opt-In	Cold
Recipients	1,000	100,000
Open Rate	25%	2.50%
Opens	750	2,500

What About Nurturing Bulk Emails?

Nurturing your email contacts is crucial to guiding them to a purchase. A bottom-of-funnel message to 100,000 cold contacts will most likely see a huge unsubscribe rate and risk getting blacklisted for spamming. Not to mention, it won’t provide the purchases you’re looking for.

Don’t try to force leads down the funnel. In fact, don’t think of your bulk email marketing as a separate entity at all. Instead, think of it as widening the top of your existing funnel. Use your bulk email to drive opt-ins and then add them to your nurturing cadences.

Once they’re well-nurtured and warmed up, then you go for the sale. If you need tips on crafting strategy and content for your emails, check out our guide to cold email copywriting.

Where Do I Get Such a Big List?

Opt-in lists are earned by constantly providing a stream of valuable content, attending events, advertising on social media, optimizing for search, and so on. All that effort yields warm, engaged leads – but very slowly. Building a list of 100,000 subscribers would take a very long time.

There are numerous ways to get a list, and many of them can do more harm than good. Take scraping, for example: there are tools out there that will crawl the internet for you and retrieve (or scrape) email addresses they find.

Scraping can be highly sophisticated. It can recognize email addresses that aren’t actually formatted as email addresses. For example, if you wrote out “my_email (at) provider (dot) com”, a scraper bot could still get your email from that string of text. They can generate email lists quickly, but they come with two major problems.

What Problems Come with an Untargeted Bulk Email List?

First, you have no way of knowing who’s behind the email addresses. You can’t possibly know if what you’re sending is in any way relevant to them, so emailing them absolutely constitutes spam. Spamming gets you blacklisted and destroys your sender reputation, which effectively puts an end to your email marketing in general. In short, you don’t want to do it.

The second issue is the low quality of the list that these bots generate. Their sophistication works against them in that regard – let’s say they find a post somewhere that says “Everyone is at the library. Join us upstairs!”. A scraper bot would interpret that as “everyoneis@thelibrary.join”, which is obviously not actually a real email address.

Even when the email addresses it finds are real, there’s still a risk of the email being a spam trap. These are addresses that exist solely to flag spam. They may have once been actively-used addresses that have since been repurposed, or they may have been created expressly to track spam. Either way, sending to one of these can result in your domain being blacklisted as spam.

The best, most reliable and safe way to acquire a large cold email list is to use a reputable data provider. Your purchased list should be tailored to your needs and targeted at the right audience.

At Clickback, we partner with reputable data providers who would be happy to supply you with a list that matches your buyer persona. If you’re in need of a list, you can reach out to us.

What Do I Do With My New List?

So with a new understanding of cold email, a great email idea, and a brand new list of contacts — what now? We mentioned earlier that most email platforms only let you send up to 1,000 emails per day, so you need something new.

The tool you’re looking for is Clickback, a platform specifically built for bulk email marketing. There’s no cap on the number of recipients you can send to, so your email campaigns can be as massive as you want. In addition, when you upload your list, every single contact is checked and verified through multiple filters to remove bad data and spam traps.

You’ll benefit from industry-leading deliverability, and everything you need to make sure your cold campaigns reach the recipient’s inbox. It checks your email content in real-time and notifies you of words, formatting and links that could negatively impact your deliverability.

Our Customer Success Team can even provide you with advice and best practices to help you make your bulk email campaigns successful.

Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free, live 1-on-1 tour of the software.