Over the years, Gmail has become one of the most popular email services available. With about 1.5 billion active users across the globe, the app is clearly ahead of other email service providers. Gmail hardly needs any introduction. If you’ve ever sent an email, chances are, you probably did so from a Gmail account.
It is common knowledge that Gmail can send individual emails, but not everyone who uses the app knows that they can create a mailing list in Gmail and send the same message to hundreds of recipients at the same time.
The closest some users have come to mailing multiple recipients is manually entering email addresses and using the CC (carbon copy) or BCC (blind carbon copy) features. This process is not only tedious and time-consuming, but it is prone to mistakes.
If you send out mass emails frequently, especially to the same set of recipients, you will find this post particularly useful.
Email List in Gmail: Why Does It Matter?
The key advantage of creating a mailing list is that it saves you a lot of time and effort.
Sending an email to one person or organization is pretty quick and simple. However, doing the same for several recipients is a different ballgame entirely. The time it takes to type in each address when you send mass emails manually can make the task cumbersome.
With this feature, all you have to do is add your email list to the recipient field and send your email. Everyone on the list will get the email within seconds without manually adding their email addresses.
With your mailing list created, you’ve said your goodbyes to underutilizing one of Gmail’s most efficient features. Manually sending the same message repeatedly to different recipients will be officially a thing of the past!
Steps to Create Email List in Gmail
Think of it this way: creating an email list in Gmail is similar to creating a group on a social media platform. You can send an instant message to everyone in the group at the same time.
It is not complicated to create email lists in Gmail. The entire process is quite simple, as demonstrated below.
Step 1: Access the Google Contact page
The first step is to log in to your Gmail account and launch the Google Contacts app from Google Apps. Another way to access Google Contacts is to visit the site at https://contacts.google.com/ or click here.
Step 2: Select Your Contacts
A list of all your contacts and their email addresses is shown on the Contacts page. Select the ones you will like to add to the list by checking the box before the contact’s name.
Note: You need to be careful when doing this because if you include a wrong contact, they will get an email that is not meant for them. On the other hand, if you leave out someone who is supposed to get the information you want to send, they will miss out.
Step 3: Create a New Label for the List
From the list of icons on the top of your Contacts page, right below the search box, click the “Label” icon (it looks like a tag). A drop-down menu will appear. Select the “Create label” option (usually, the last option). The other options are for adding contacts to an already existing label.
Now, enter a name for the new label (mailing list). This will serve as the group name.
There you have it! You have successfully created an email list in Gmail. And the best part is that you can create multiple lists to suit different purposes or groups as you deem fit. If you have a list of 250 contacts, for example, you don’t have to use only that list and then go through it to remove or add contacts each time you want to send mass emails.
You can create a mailing list for your family, work colleagues, friends, professional associates, mastermind group, and others. When you need to send a specific message to each of these groups, all you have to do is select the group from your list of labels and email them.
Sending Email to Your List
Now that you’ve created a mailing list sending out emails to multiple recipients is a lot easier. Here’s how to do that:
- Log in to your Gmail account and click on the “Compose” button
- Type the group or mailing list label name in the “To” field or address field
- Compose your message as you would normally do
- When you are done, click the “Send” button to send your mass email
A Few Things to Note
If you want to create an email list in Gmail, you need to be aware of a few guidelines and limitations to this feature.
- First, you cannot send emails to more than 500 recipients in a single day. Google has a 500-email daily limit to prevent spam and other unwholesome practices.
- Adding a large number of contacts to your mailing list is prone to errors and may be time-consuming. However, you only have to do this once, at least for each group you create.
- Email stats and analytics are important for salespeople and email marketers. It helps them know what email marketing campaigns are working or not. But when you create email list in Gmail, the app does not send you any of this vital feedback. For this reason, this Gmail feature is best suited for casual use, and not for serious marketing campaigns.
- It is difficult to automatically follow-up with recipients that didn’t respond to your mass email. For example, if you sent an email to 100 people and only 30 responded, you will have to manually go through your list and select the 70 recipients who didn’t respond and do a follow-up. Again, this adds to the earlier suggestion: create email list in Gmail only if you want to use it to reach your contacts, but not as a marketing tool.
