A step-by-step guide to sending mass emails from Salesforce
If you need to send an email to multiple recipients (e.g. leads and/or contacts) from Salesforce, here are the choices that you have
- Use “Send List Email” from List View
- Use “Send List Email” from Campaign
- Send emails through Apex
- Use an AppExchange Package
- Use Marketing Cloud
- Use Pardot
In this blog post, we will see how to send mass emails using the first two options i.e. using the “Send List Email” feature.
Many times there is a requirement to send the same email to multiple recipients. This can be for sending introductory emails, brochures, invitations, festival greetings etc. In Salesforce, you can send an individual copy of an email to a group of people like Leads, Contacts, Person Accounts, and Campaign Members and there is no need to BCC the recipients to do that.
Sending mass emails from Salesforce is simple. Create a list of recipients. Create an email template with merge fields to personalize each copy of the email and off you go.
When a List Email is sent, an Activity is logged on that particular record with a prefix ‘List Email’. You can view all the List Email records by accessing the List Email object from App Launcher. Finally, you can also create a report using the standard HTML Email Status Report type and analyze key details about your list email such as whether the email was opened, which recipients opened, how many times, etc.
Although this is a cool tool that improves user productivity, there are some important points to note.
Considerations when sending List Email in Lightning Experience
- To log list email activities, list email logging must be enabled
- List email isn’t sent if:
- An email has bounced
- A recipient is missing an email address
- A recipient (contact, lead, or person account) selected Email Opt-Out
- Send List Email button isn’t available in Kanban view
- List email can’t be sent using a Classic Visualforce email template. Similarly, Classic Visualforce email templates aren’t supported in the Lightning List Email action
List Email Limitations
- When sending it from a list view, you can select a maximum of up to 200 leads or contacts only
- List emails count against an org’s daily list email send limit, which is 5,000 emails per day.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to setup and send List Email in Lightning Experience. Within the next 30 minutes, you will learn how to:
- Enable List Email for Your Users
- Send List Email
- Check List Email Object Record
- Create HTML Email Status Report
NOTE: Certain sections of the guide will appear as locked in the free preview. You can download the unlocked version of the guide in PDF format by subscribing to our “All Access” Pass through the link below.
Especially that you mentioned HTML Email Status Report – this helped me a lot, as it’s not mentioned in other resources documentation. So I thought that the only way to track this info is to use Marketing Cloud or Pardot. Have a good day!
References & Useful URLs
- Considerations for Sending List Email in Lightning Experience – Help Article (10 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=email_list_email_considerations.htm
- Enable List Email – Help Article (10 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=email_list_email_enable.htm
- Send a List Email in Lightning Experience – Help Article (10 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=email_list_email_create.htm
- List Email Limitations – Help Article (10 mins) – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=limitations_email_list_email.htm
- Send Personalized Emails to a Group (Lightning Experience) – YouTube Video (4:09 mins) – https://youtu.be/h5NIIUr_5Mo
Is there a way to import or transfer accounts that I already have uploaded into salesforce (specifically with emails listed in salesforce) into the leads list versus manually typing in and adding each new lead? Thank you!
Hi J,
There isn’t any out of the box way to do this. You can export the data from Accounts and import it into Leads. The other way will be to write an Apex code. Though I wonder why do you want to do this?
Regards,
Ashish
Do you know if there is any way to send an email to a campaign list with a different ‘from’ address?
Hi Paul, this is not something that is available out of the box. But you should be able to achieve this using Flows or Apex.
Ashish,
I appreciate this article and it was very helpful. I was wondering how to track “Click Through” in Mass Emails. I thought that it would be covered here as well but did not see any reference on how to include “Clicks” in this report.
Have a Great Day!
Thanks Shawn. Please note that Salesforce does not track ‘Click throughs’ in the emails sent from it’s CRM platform. It just tracks whether the email was opened or not. If you want to track click throughs, you will need to use a proper email marking tool like Marketing Cloud, Pardot or 3rd party products like AWeber, ConvertKit, Mailchimp etc.
Thank you for this Article!!!
Especially that you mentioned HTML Email Status Report – this helped me a lot, as it’s not mentioned in other resources documentation. So I thought that the only way to track this info is to use Marketing Cloud or Pardot.
Have a good day!
Good to know that it was helpful Mr. Green 🙂