Who would’ve thought sending an email blast to multiple recipients could be so fraught with troubles? Personalization is tricky, and in many cases, your recipients will see if you add multiple recipients. This never looks professional and could be considered an invasion of privacy. So, let’s look at how to send emails without showing recipients so that you can start sending more professional mass emails. Keep reading to learn how to send a mass email and hide recipients in Gmail.
How to Send Emails Without Showing Recipients?
The easiest way to send a mass email and hide recipients in Gmail is using the Bcc feature. When using it, you still add all the email addresses of your recipients, but the feature signals to the email client that you don’t want the other recipients to be visible to the person receiving the email. Let’s take a quick look at how to do undisclosed recipients in Gmail using the Bcc function.
Step 1: Click on Compose in Gmail
The first step is to click on ‘Compose’ in Gmail to create a new email. The ‘Compose’ button is usually located at the top of the left-hand menu and is indicated with a pencil icon.
Step 2: Add ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ as the Main Recipient
Once your new email screen opens, click on the ‘To’ field, where you’ll usually add your recipient’s email address. Instead of adding an email address, first type out ‘Undisclosed recipients:.’ After this, add [email protected] in angle brackets (<>). For example, Undisclosed recipients:<[email protected]>.
Step 3: Add Other Recipients to the Bcc Field
Now, click on the Bcc option, which is located to the right of the ‘To’ field. By clicking on it, you’ll now have access to the Bcc field, where you can add the email addresses of all your recipients.
Step 4: Create Your Message
Now you can proceed to create your email message. Remember to use a catchy subject line that draws in the reader, followed by the body of your email. Don’t forget to introduce yourself if necessary. Use the best email writing strategies to ensure your message doesn’t end up in the recipient’s spam. Once you’ve created your message, click on the ‘Send’ button to send a Bcc group email in Gmail.
Limitations of Using Bcc
While Bcc is one of the simplest built-in ways to send a mass email without revealing all your recipients, this function is still limited. Let’s take a look at some of the limitations of using the Bcc function when sending group emails.
Using ‘Reply All’ Risks Revealing All Your Recipients
One of the most significant risks to using the Bcc feature when sending mass emails is revealing all your recipients accidentally. Doing this negates all the efforts you put into using this function in the first place. Unfortunately, this happens easily, especially if you use the ‘Reply All’ option.
The ‘Reply All’ option isn’t available to your Bcc recipients. This is mainly because, in their email, there are no other recipients. However, this isn’t the case with anyone listed in the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ fields. These recipients will all be able to click on ‘Reply All,’ when they do, their response, along with all of the recipients in Bcc, will become visible to everyone.
You might wonder why anyone would make this mistake, but it happens more frequently than you think. Have you ever received an email, and when replying, you click on ‘Reply All’ only to realize later that your response was meant for only the sender? Well, if you do this with a Bcc email, all of the recipients will be revealed.
Entering Emails Manually Is Time-Consuming
Adding the email addresses for your recipients can quickly become time-consuming. How many recipients are in your mailing list, 50, 100, or more? Copy and pasting or typing each address if you have many recipients can take a long time. Think of how many people you include in a marketing blast. What will you do when your mailing list grows into thousands of users? Are you going to type out each email address manually? Or will you copy them from another source?
Another problem that occurs with manually typing in email addresses is that mistakes happen. It’s very easy to make a mistake when typing out email addresses or even when copying them. The issue with this is that if the email address is wrong, the email will bounce back. This will negatively impact your email reputation, which can cause more of your emails to end up in spam.
Finally, Gmail limits how many emails you can send daily. If you’re a personal (or free) Gmail user, this limit is 500 emails daily. If you have a Google Workspace account, the limit is slightly higher at 1,500 daily emails. If you try to send more than the maximum limit, you’ll get an error, and you won’t be able to send emails for the next 24 hours. This means that if you have a large mailing list, you’ll have to segment your email blasts to spread them out over a number of days.
You’ll also have to keep track of who has been sent an email and who still needs to receive one. This is less than ideal, as mistakes can happen very easily, but it also takes a lot of time and effort to manage.
Personalization Is Limited
You’ve probably already heard that email personalization is vital when sending out mass emails. No one wants to feel like part of the crowd. Your recipients want to feel special, and being able to personalize your communications by using their first names or remembering their birthdays will have a big impact on the open rate of your emails.
80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if your communications are personalized. Furthermore, 99% of marketers say that personalization improves customer relationships. These stats can’t be ignored if you want to launch successful email campaigns.
However, when you use Bcc, the email addresses may be hidden, but everyone receives the same message. There’s no way to personalize the contents to include individual names or other details. Not being able to personalize your emails will make it more challenging to build a relationship or create a sense of intimacy with your recipients.
A Better Option to Bcc
If you’re running a business and need to send bulk marketing emails or product releases, you might be looking for a better solution to bcc to simplify the process. Luckily, there’s a simple solution available that enables you to continue using Gmail but adds functionality to send personalized emails to your recipients without showing their email addresses. This solution is adding a simple mail merge Gmail extension.
A mail merge extension enables users to create personalized mass emails, but you can send them to multiple recipients easily. Some of the benefits of this type of extension are the following:
- Each email is sent individually with no risk of showing other recipients’ details.
- You don’t have to enter addresses manually.
- Emails can be personalized.
If this sounds like a much better option, here are a few great mail merge tools that you can look at:
- Mail Merge
- MailMeteor: Mail Merge for Gmail
- Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM): Mail Merge for Gmail
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to send mass emails from Gmail in a way that recipients are hidden from each other. To do this, you simply use the Bcc function. However, this option has some limitations, such as no personalization, and it can take a lot of time. A better solution is using a mail merge extension for Gmail.
If you decide to use mail merge to create mass email campaigns straight from Gmail, why not also consider using the Free Email Tracker for Gmail by PandaDoc? This extension will make it easy to track whether users have opened your email, how many times it was viewed, and more.
