When I've been talking with prospects over the past few months, I've been seeing increasing confusion in what types of sales and marketing email tools there are and how they should be used. But it is VERY important to know the differences and why. If you use the wrong tools for the wrong job, you could cause some real damage, including even getting suspended by your email marketing provider or burning down your email domain reputation.
There are basically two different types of marketing and sales email tools: 1:many email tools and 1:1 email tools.
Let's look at what they are and what are the differences.
1:Many Email Tools
Historically, almost all email marketing tools were what's called 1:many email tools. They are designed to send large volumes of email on behalf of your domain.
Examples include:
- MailChimp
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Constant Contact
- Marketo
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud (including Pardot and ExactTarget)
How they work
1:many email tools work by running their own email sending server infrastructure. They send emails through their own servers on behalf of your domain and your email address. They do not run through your own email servers. That is why you don't see all your MailChimp or Marketo emails showing up in your Sent folder in your Outlook or Gmail even after sending out a blast email through them.
These email service providers do this all through their own email infrastructure so that they can do these email sends at large scale without being reliant on the capacity or policies of your own email servers. They can send tens of thousands or even millions of emails in less than a minute. Because they are using their own email servers, they can also auto-track things like bounces and unsubscribes and update the status of your contacts automatically.
Authentication
So if someone receives an email from MailChimp claiming to be sent on behalf of, say, george@acmecorp.com, how can MailChimp prove to the recipient that george@acmecorp.com has actually given permission to MailChimp to send it on behalf of his email address? George can demonstrate this permission by setting up special authentication tokens between his domain name servers and MailChimp that prove that MailChimp has permission from the administrators of acmecorp.com to send emails on their behalf.
The most common type of authentication to do this is called DKIM authentication. If possible, it is also recommended to add in two other sets of authentication tokens called SPF and DMARC as well. But at the bare minimum you need to set up DKIM authentication. Otherwise the email servers of the recipients have no way to trust whether or not the person who sent the MailChimp campaign is actually authorized to send emails on behalf of the domain owner or not. If they can't trust that the mail sending server is authorized by the domain owner, it's very likely that they will classify the email as spam. And you don't want that!
Strict Compliance Monitoring
Because these 1:many email systems are set up to send large volumes of email for many different senders, and they are using their own email server infrastructure to do it, they implement very strict rules for deliverability and spam complaint rates. They don't want the reputation of their entire email server infrastructure compromised by some people using their systems to send spam mail. So they will watch the results of your email sends very closely. If you send an email blast and too many of your recipients mark you as spam, they can and will suspend your account with them. I've seen it happen! One individual customer of theirs is not worth risking the reputation of their entire infrastructure.
It's not just spam complaint rates either. If your unsubscribe rate is high or even your bounce rate is high, the email sending providers will oftentimes warn you or even suspend you in those cases as well.
Because of this, you need to make sure you are doing strict email opt-in management of your email list, and only using these tools to send emails to people who have opted in to receive emails from you.
Another compliance tool that these senders require is always including unsubscribe links so that your recipients have the option to no longer hear from you if they choose. Historically they required you to put these unsubscribe links somewhere in the body of the email, but nowadays it is oftentimes also required to upgrade your unsubscribe functionality to include 1-click unsubscribe functionality as well, so users can unsubscribe right from the top of the email without having to hunt for it in the email body.
Here is an example of what a 1-click unsubscribe looks like in Gmail.
The "Promotions" Tab
One other thing to know: email service providers like Gmail and Outlook can recognize which emails were sent directly from a person and which emails were sent by one of these bulk email providers. And so they will filter the emails accordingly. In Gmail, emails sent directly from a person will show up in the Primary tab of the inbox, and emails from 1:many senders will show up in either the Promotions tab or Updates tab. In Outlook personal emails will show up in the Focused tab, and the emails from the bulk providers will show up in the Other tab.
Why Use a 1:Many Email Tool?
Given these restrictions, why would you want to use a 1:many email tool rather than a 1:1 email tool? The main reason is that they are designed to run at scale. If you try to send thousands of emails per day through 1:1 email tools like Gmail or Microsoft 365, they will cut you off. They only want their systems to be used for personal emails, not bulk emails. If your mailing list is in the thousands or tens of thousands or millions, 1:many email tools are the only way to go.
You also get other benefits by using these tools as well: they will have built-in subscription preference and unsubscribe management, built-in open rate, click rate, and bounce rate tracking, and you can also usually do custom HTML designs on your emails in these systems as well.
1:1 Email Tools
Now let's look at the other main type of sales and marketing email tools on the market. We will call them 1:1 email tools.
Examples Include:
- Outreach
- Salesloft
- HubSpot Sales Hub
- Apollo
- Zoominfo Engage
How 1:1 email tools work
Rather than sending emails through their servers on behalf of your email address, these 1:1 email providers will actually connect to your own email servers via an API and send emails directly through your own email servers. So if you connect Outreach to your Gmail account and start sending emails through Outreach, you will actually see those emails show up in the Sent folder in your Gmail account.
What does this mean for you?
One benefit of these tools sending emails directly as 1:1 emails from you through your own email servers is that your emails will usually show up in the Primary tab (in Gmail) or the Focused tab (in Outlook) in your recipients' inboxes, rather than the promotions tab. So that's a big plus!
But one BIG implication of this is that you now need to follow the sending policies of your own email service provider. Gmail, for instance, doesn't want you using their system to send bulk email, so they will limit you to just a couple hundred emails per day. If your email address is new, they might limit your sends per day even more. So it will be impossible to send thousands or tens of thousands of emails per day through 1:1 email tools like this.
Email/Domain Reputation
You will also be responsible for maintaining your email reputation and domain reputation yourself. Just because you don't have a third party like HubSpot or MailChimp watching your spam complaint rates doesn't give you a free pass. If too many people start reporting your emails as spam, you will lower the reputation of your email address and your domain in the email server provider ecosystem, and your emails could start getting blocked by your recipients' spam filters.
Here is an example of a "message blocked" response from a recipient's spam filter.
So be careful! If too many of your messages sent through 1:1 email tools get reported as spam, you might drop the deliverability of your entire email address!
Why use a 1:1 email tool?
So what is the purpose of using a 1:1 email tool like Outreach or HubSpot Sales Hub? The purpose is to help you scale and streamline your personal email communication. A good example of this is sales prospecting. You could build a list of people that you think are the most ideal-fit prospects for you, and then you can write up an email to introduce yourself to them. You can send these emails one by one directly through Gmail of course. Or you could use a tool like HubSpot Sales Hub to save your message as a template, customize it as needed for each of your prospects, and then schedule it so that you're not manually clicking the Send button in Gmail over and over. But don't forget that your email service provider, such as Gmail or Microsoft 365, has very strict send volume limits! You shouldn't plan on sending more than 50-100 emails per day per email address like this. Your email service provider is designed for personal email, and these 1:1 email tools are there to help you streamline this personal correspondence, not turn it into a spam cannon.
A Note on HubSpot Specifically
Several tools listed here ONLY do 1:many emails or 1:1 emails. For instance, MailChimp only does 1:many emails, while Salesloft only does 1:1 emails. On HubSpot they have both tools available on their platform. HubSpot Marketing Hub has 1:many email tools, and HubSpot Sales Hub has 1:1 email tools. It is important not to confuse these two! I see people do this a lot. They want to take a list of 10,000 people and drop it into the HubSpot Marketing Email tool to hit them all at once. That is a great way to get your account suspended. Don't forget, because these 1:many email tools are designed for such large volumes, they are very very sensitive about opt-ins and spam complaints. If you want to introduce yourself to a list like this, use the HubSpot Sales Hub 1:1 email tool connected to your own email to do that, with probably no more than 50 people per day.
Which type of email tool should you use?
Use 1:many email tools like MailChimp or HubSpot Marketing Hub for your marketing email lists. You will need to track opt-in consent and set up a privacy policy. Your list can grow as big as you need it, even into the millions, with no scaling issues.
Use 1:1 email tools like Outreach or HubSpot Sales Hub to help you streamline your personal communication. They have great tools to help you manage it such as templates, snippets, sequences, and follow-up automation. But remember that these 1:1 email tools are meant to help you streamline your personal email communication, not just blast people at large scale. Keep your email volume to no more than 50-100 per day, and watch closely for too many spam filter notifications or negative responses from your recipients.
With this understanding of email tools and these considerations in mind, you should be all set up to start building and maintaining great relationships with your customers and prospects through email. Happy emailing.
