Follow the mail merge rules from this article to reduce your chance of being blocked by Google or getting spam complaints.
You are allowed to send bulk emails only to recipients who agreed to receive emails from you. Otherwise, they can report your email for abuse, even if you think that your email is legitimate and targets the right audience.
Learn more in this following article: What is spam? How is your email marked as spam?
Google will carefully monitor your usage if you are using a new G Suite or Gmail account to send a campaign.
We recommend to warm up your account:
If you receive a lot of bounces or undeliverable messages, double check your contact list again. This means that your database is outdated, or not legitimate.
Check our documentation about bounce issues: 'Bounce Rate'
Please use wisely your account when sending bulk emails, otherwise your will be blocked by Google. If you are facing this issue, please check this article: 'My account has been blocked by Google'
| Do's | Why? |
|---|---|
| Double opt-in method | To get explicit authorization from your recipients: They should always give you their permission before emailing them |
| Send a confirmation email to the subscribers | Once someone has signed-up to your website he should get a confirmation email that contains a link where he can click to activate the account. |
| Be sure to collect only valid email addresses | To reduce thus the number of undeliverable adresses: What are bounces? How to track bounce rate? |
| Single opt-in method: use this method wisely | Their permission is less explicit because they won't receive the confirmation email. |
| Don'ts | Why? |
|---|---|
| Use or purchase a list of email addresses from an online database | Most of the time these lists have been bought by unscrupulous companies without the consent of the accounts' owners (and even without them knowing it!) |
| Sending emails to this list | Recipient will mark your email as spam, and spam filters will collect all the abuse reports. In the end, it will only harm the reputation of your domain/company and in the future, your email will be much more likely to be flagged as spam again even if you corrected your emailing behavior with better practices. |
Most of the time, email marketers use subjective criteria to assume that people gave them the permission to send emails.
| Do's | Don'ts |
|---|---|
| If you met your customers at a trade fair, ask them directly if they want to receive messages from you (e.g.: By filling a paper form.) If you are managing an online shop, add a checkbox to subscribe to your news when they sign-in your website. | Even if when they explicitly exposed their contact details online (e.g.: On LinkedIn or others social networks), don't infer that they allowed you to send them emails, especially when it is about promotional emails. |
| Do's | Why? |
|---|---|
| While transactional emails (welcome email, purchase confirmation, invoice etc.) are expected right after a specific action (signing-up, purchasing a product etc.), newsletters and bulk emails have to be planned and integrated them into your marketing strategy. | If you are sending the first newsletter 6 months after their last purchase, your subscribers might have probably forgotten you, so flag your email as spam or unsubscribe. All your previous efforts to build and maintain an up-to-date database are thus almost gone … |
| Do's | Don'ts |
|---|---|
| Always to keep the same brand image in your emails so that your subscribers can more easily recognize them. By 'brand image', we are mainly talking about the design guidelines, the logo, the messages conveyed to your customers (and how they understand them), the tons etc. of your organization. |
If you are getting too far away from your brand image, people will get confused and wouldn't want to be more engaged with you through your emails. |
| Do's |
|---|
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Insert a clear unsubscribe link to your email: 
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| Why? |
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If you don't clearly offer them the possibility to unsubscribe, they will click on the 'Mark as spam' button, which has consequences on your domain and reputation. 
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