Salesforce Mass Email Guide: Functionality, Limits And Alternatives

Looking to send mass emails in Salesforce? In this post, we will review Salesforce mass email functionality, current mass email limits, apps and tools that might help you to mass email to your Salesforce records.

In Winter’19 Release notes, Salesforce announced new mass email enhancements: it will be possible to track open rates and email bounces (inaccurate emails or emails that were not delivered).

Today, Salesforce has climbed up or even skyrocketed to the first place among other CRM software solutions, according to Gartner and in 2017 its market share accounted for 19.6%, as masonfrank international pointed out in their article.

But before planning your first mass email campaigns in Salesforce, let’s see how it is done here and what limitations you should expect.

How to Send Mass Email in Salesforce Lightning

Let’s start with the fact that Salesforce mass email has actually been renamed and is now called “List Email”. So, how do you do send them in Lightning (the new interface of Salesforce)?

Step 1. Click Contacts to see your list of contacts. Make sure your contacts section is “All contacts” and not “Recently viewed” that is set by default.

Step 2. When you’ve selected all the recipients, you’re ready to send the list email. Click the arrow box in the right corner to see the drop-down menu and choose “Send List Email”.

Step 3. You’ll see a classic email editor where you can attach some files to the recipients, and you’re good to go. Click Send. Done

Wait, Wait, Wait

But what if you don’t want to send your email to all of the recipients? Let’s get back to the step 2. Before you hit the arrow box and choose “Send List Email” you can filter out your contacts and choose only those whom you need. You can manually uncheck the records if you have up to 10-20 contacts in the list. But what if there are 100 people?

Step 1. Make sure you have “All contacts selected”. Check the right upper corner to see the settings button. Click settings and choose “Edit List Filters”.

Step 2. By default, you have only one filter, but you can add more of them by clicking “Add Filter”. From the drop-down menu, you can choose the filter, for example, Campaign Member Status for list email.

Step 3. When you’ve filtered the contacts, you can now compile a new list email. Click the arrow box and choose “Send List Email”.

Step 4. Select or create email template in Salesforce

Depending on your goal, you can try to search for the template email, or you can as well use merge options yourself to include custom parameters from the contact record. Right above the send button, you can click “Insert Email Template” to choose your template. If you haven’t found any, you can also create an email template in Salesforce yourself.

You can also insert “Merge Fields” if you want. Choose what you need and click insert. When the email is ready, click send.

Step 5. You’ll receive an email notification when your Salesforce email is sent.

Step 6. Done.

Watch the video below to see all these steps in action. (AscendixRE is a commercial real estate CRM on top of Salesforce and uses the Salesforce mass email functionality).

Salesforce Mass Email Limits

Now, when you know how to mass email in Salesforce, it’s wise to review current Salesforce limitations. Right now, the current Salesforce mass email limit is 5,000 emails per org per day sent to external email addresses. As to internal users, you can send an unlimited amount of emails. Even though this is the information on the Salesforce website, there are a lot of users claiming absolutely different numbers.

“Salesforce is like set of riddles that you need to solve to see the big picture.”, says Varsha Venkatesh, Salesforce Adoption Expert.It’s indeed a set of riddles, and some of the solutions show that you can send only 250 mass emails in 24 hours if your plan is below Enterprise.

We, however, will stick to the Salesforce docs and we believe that the best way to know the exact Salesforce pricing or limitations is to contact their support. The prices vary from $25 per user to $300, billed annually.

Apart from the amount of emails limit, there are also other limitations that are worth mentioning:

• You can attach files but they will be shown as links, and a user will be redirected to another page to download the file.
• If you have a duplicate email address, it will be counted anyway. If you have ten [email protected] emails, they will be counted as if they were unique.
• If a user is not in your contact list, you can’t send them an email.
• You can send an unlimited amount of emails to your employees within the company.
• In your trial period, you can only send 10 emails per day.
• You can’t send mass emails built with a Visualforce template.
• Filtering is an overcomplicated process that requires some detective and logic skills, for example, you can’t filter contacts by industry by simply choosing the filter from a drop-down list.
• You can’t filter out contacts without email addresses. Right now, there is no search operator ‘is not blank’. UPDATE: you can filter out contacts without email. Set the Operator = ‘not equal to’ and leave the Value blank.

Salesforce: Available Filters for the Field ‘Email’

Facing all those Salesforce limitations, you may sooner or later ask yourself is there any software on the web that extends that lacking functionality?

Ascendix Search

Let’s start with our own app for Salesforce Ascendix Search. Ascendix Search wasn’t built to send newsletters, however, you can send text emails with images or files.

Ascendix Search Interface

Also, there are features that will simplify list preparation for your mass email campaigns:

• It’s easy to create granular email lists of leads, contacts or other objects to mass email: filter out emails that are blank, add multiple criteria including criteria across objects.
• You can attach images when sending emails using Ascendix Search (Images cannot exceed 1 MB).
• You can export created/saved List views to Excel with one click and upload to other marketing software.
• Salesforce mass update feature lets you mass edit your list of records, e.g. you might create a field ‘Last Newsletter Date’ and can add the date of mass email campaigns.

Check out the video to see sending mass emails with Ascendix Search in action:

Note, that Ascendix Search is an app on top of Salesforce so it can’t extend your sending limits in Salesforce, however, you can create more complex mass email lists and then export them to use in another marketing tool.

How Much Does It Cost?

Ascendix Search doesn’t have any hidden costs, its price is $15 per user per month. Apart from the search and email functionality you can additionally upgrade your plan for 10$ and get a report generating tool called Composer that allows you to create highly customizable reports. It can be a great option combined with Ascendix Search. Start your free trial of Ascendix Search.

How to Send Salesforce Mass Emails With Ascendix Search

Using Ascendix Search, you can send plain text emails to your leads, clients, and partners.

Let’s imagine that we need to send a message to our contacts from Texas that have not been yet contacted and those who are in the finance industry.

Step 1. Creating a mailing list

Open Ascendix Search, select Contacts in the Search For and fill in the required fields. Click save if you want to save this search for the future updates. And click “Search”.

Ascendix Search: Creating a list view. Notice that email shouldn’t be blank according to our filters.

Step 2. In our example, we haven’t found any records for these parameters. For us, it’s a good opportunity to see how the Salesforce mass contact editing works. We will add new parameters in bulk to selected contacts from the unfiltered contact list.

Note: Make sure you have selected “Accounts” for “Search For” field. Revenue and industry parameters are applied to accounts and not contacts.

In the opened form edit the necessary fields and click save.

Ascendix Serch: Mass Edit of Salesforce Contacts

Step 3. Now, when we’ve made these changes, we can go back to our contact list and apply our saved search. Once you’ve filtered your contacts, you can send your first mass email to them.

Step 4. Click on the email icon to send a mass email to the selected contacts.

Here you can add imagery, PDFs, DOCs, reports and other files which your customers, leads, tenants and others can easily download. You can also add images within the text.

Step 6. Upload your files, enter the message and click “Send”. Done.

That’s it!

Using this app, you don’t need to ask your Salesforce administrator or somebody else to create an email list for you or to export the records you need to mass email. Instead, you can do it with a few clicks and save lots of time. Ascendix Search has other features that simplify the everyday Salesforce usage, so go to AppExchange and try it for free during 30 days.

ContactMonkey

ContactMonkey is a smart email marketing platform that offers Salesforce integration and email tracking services. Using ContactMonkey you can integrate your Salesforce with Outlook and Gmail and manage your emails in your email box.

You can easily send follow-ups, notifications and invitations to your Salesforce contacts or leads. The information about leads or contacts is updated automatically, and you don’t need to enter things manually.

You can also send mass emails with ContactMonkey pretty easily. The limit of mass emails is 200 for a professional plan that starts with $15 per user per month, however, you can save some money with annual payment.

Apart from mass emails functionality, ContactMonkey offers an amazing opportunity to track emails activity, such as was the email opened, when, how many times, from what device and other functionality.

There are certain ContactMonkey limitations of tracked emails:

• The open won’t be counted if the recipient has images disabled;
• If the recipient uses plain text email, it won’t be counted as an opened email.

For more information about what ContactMonkey is you can check out ContactMonkey help center.

Mailchimp

Integrate Salesforce with Mailchimp to start sending mass emails. Mailchimp is a simple-to-use yet a complex marketing platform that allows you to send as many emails as you want. The only limit is your money, you can calculate your costs based on how many emails you need to send.

The good news about Mailchimp is that they offer a free plan with 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 per months. It’s good if you need to test a bulk email send before upgrading to a higher plan.

Limitations in Mailchimp mostly concern high-volume email lists upload, it may require a developer to upload a list of a few hundred thousand subscribers through API. Working with an extremely large email list may cause a slow load of statistics and other list pages. Mailchimp bulk actions limit touches three major points: list combining, subscriber moving and list deleting.

Mailchimp offers various plan from free to $199 and higher. Depending on your needs and desires you can check their website to choose a plan that fits best for you.

Pardot

Pardot is a Salesforce product, a B2B marketing automation software that may dramatically increase your sales and marketing performance and help you close more deals and get more ROI.

Pardot platform helps you build an incredibly customizable customer journey and determine the behavioral patterns, and what’s more is to follow up those microinteractions along the way. Check out the video to learn more about Pardot.

Pardot mass email limitations:

• Pardot admins can set up mass email limitations which range from 0 to 500 emails. However, the default limit ranges from 200 to 500.
• Email builder is too advanced that some email clients cannot render all the templates;
• Issues with multiple users working on one email. Edits may not be saved.
• A prospect may receive the same email twice.
• Other limitations.

Pardot is a costly solution even though it may be highly beneficial for big companies who are ready to invest a lot of resources and money into marketing automation. The prices range between $1,250 and $4,000.

If you are looking for less pricey complete marketing automation solutions that integrate well with Salesforce, consider Makesbridge (from $330 per month) and Act-On (starting at $900 per month).

Conclusions

There are a lot of Salesforce mass email solutions that you may choose from. Regardless of your choice, bear in mind that the best solutions are those that offer you a possibility to integrate your email providers with a CRM so that you can manage your data properly. Keeping all your data relevant and updating it quickly is the best option for a sales rep, broker, agency or entire company.

Need help with your Salesforce org? Contact us!

 Authored by Philip Volna