Introduction
Welcome back to another episode of The RevOps Hero podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strom, and today I'll be talking about a topic that I've seen a lot of confusion about, and that is the difference between one-to-one email tools and one-to-many email tools.
As I've been talking with people in the past year or so, I've been seeing a lot of confusion and mixing up of these two different types of email tools, but it's very important to know the differences between them and why. If you use the wrong tools for the wrong job, you could do some real damage, including even getting suspended by your email marketing provider or even damaging your email reputation. So let's look at the differences between these two types of tools, one-to-many email tools and one-to-one marketing tools, and see why they're different and how.
1:Many Tools
Historically, almost all email marketing tools where what were called one-to-many email tools. They're designed to send large volumes of email on behalf of your sending domain. Examples include MailChimp, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Constant Contact, Marketo, and the different versions of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including what was formerly known as Pardot and also what was formerly known as ExactTarget.
Let's talk about how these one-to-many email tools work. They work by sending emails on behalf of your domain, but they're sending it through their own email sending infrastructure, their own servers, but they're sending it through their servers on behalf of your domain and your email address, and they don't run through your own email servers. That's why, after you send a big MailChimp campaign or Marketo campaign, you don't go to your sent emails folder and you don't see 10,000 sent emails in your own personal sent folder after you send it out. So these providers are sending it all through their own email structure so that they can do these 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're using their own email servers to run all this, they can also automatically track things like bounces, unsubscribes, soft bounces, hard bounces, things like that, and update the status of the associated contact in your email list accordingly.
Authentication
Next thing to know is how they do authentication. If say your Outlook account receives an email from a MailChimp server and it claims to be sent from on behalf of, say, george@acmecorp.com, how can MailChimp prove to the receiver's email server MailChimp is actually authorized on behalf of George to send that email? George can demonstrate this permission by setting up some special authentication tokens between his domain name servers and the MailChimp servers, and that proves that MailChimp has permission from the administrators of George's email server to send emails on their behalf.
The most common type of authentication to do this is called DKIM authentication, sometimes called DKIM. If possible, it's also recommended to add in two other authentication tokens called SPF and DMARC, D-M-A-R-C, but at the bare minimum, you at least need to set up DKIM authentication, DKIM authentication. Otherwise, without any of that, the email servers of your recipients will have no way to trust whether or not the person who sent the MailChimp campaign or the HubSpot campaign or the Marketo campaign is actually authorized to send emails on behalf of the domain owner or not. And if the recipient's email servers can't trust that the email sending server is actually authorized by the domain owner, it's very likely that they will classify the email as spam, and you definitely don't want that.
Compliance
That's how these one-to-many email sending providers work. And now let's talk about what they are focused on in terms of compliance and monitoring for compliance.
Because these emails systems are designed to send large volumes of emails through their own servers for many different types of senders, they have to then implement pretty strict rules for deliverability and spam complaint rates because they don't want the reputation of their entire email server infrastructure getting compromised by a couple of people using their systems to send spam mail. So because of this, 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, the email sending provider can and will suspend your account with them. I've seen it happen myself several times because from their perspective, one individual customer, risking losing one individual customer is not worth the risk of risking the reputation of their entire domain infrastructure.
It's not just the spam complaint rates either that matter. If your unsubscribe rate is high or oftentimes even if your bounce rate is high, a hard bounce is when you email someone whose email address doesn't exist, if even the rate of that is too high, the email sending providers don't even like that and they will monitor that. And if any of those rates are high as well, they'll oftentimes warn you or possibly even suspend you in those cases as well. Again, they're concerned with protecting the reputation of their entire server infrastructure, and they're not going to let one or two email senders on their infrastructure ruin it for everyone else in the system. Because these email sending providers are so strict about monitoring for compliance, you have to make sure you're doing pretty strict email opt-in management of your list as well. You only want to be using these one-to-many email tools to send emails to people who have specifically opted in to receive email tools from you or receive emails from you.
Another newer compliance tool that these senders are oftentimes requiring now is including unsubscribe links. Historically, the always required unsubscribe links in the footer of your emails. Nowadays, they're oftentimes going further and also adding in what's called one click unsubscribe links as well. That way, if someone wants to unsubscribe from your emails, they can just click it right from the email title in their Gmail or their Outlook rather than having to hunt through to the tiny little unsubscribe text in the footer. So that's another really big compliance thing is they always require unsubscribe links, and specifically nowadays one click unsubscribe links.
Promotions Tab
Let's look at one other thing to know about using these one to many email tools. When you send emails through these services, email providers like Gmail and Outlook can recognize which emails were sent directly from a person, as in which ones are directly personal emails and which ones were sent by one of these bulk email providers. They can do it by looking at the domain of the email sending server, and what email inboxes like Gmail and Outlook will do is they'll filter these emails accordingly. So in Gmail emails sent personally directly from a person will usually show up in the primary tab of the inbox. And emails from a bulk sender or a one to many sender, like MailChimp, HubSpot Marketing, Hub Marketo, and those, will show up in either the promotions tab or the updates tab. That's in Gmail. In Outlook, the personal emails usually show up in the focus tab, and the emails from the one-to-many servers will show up in the other tab.
When to use 1:many tools
With all that in mind, why and when should you use a one-to-many email tool? The main reason you use these tools is because they're designed to run at a large scale. If you try to send thousands of emails per day through your personal one-to-one email tools like Gmail or your Outlook, Google or Microsoft or your email sending provider will actually cut you off. They only want their email systems to be used for personal emails, not for bulk emails. It's impossible to send tens of thousands or even millions of emails directly through Gmail or Outlook. If you have a mailing list that's thousands or tens of thousands or millions of people, one-to-many email tools are the only way to go.
You do also get some other benefits by using these tools as well. They have built-in subscription preferences, unsubscribe management, built-in analytics like open rate, click rate, bounce rate tracking, and oftentimes you can do custom HTML designs in your email through these systems as well.
1:1 Tools
So that's an overview of what we call one-to-many email tools. Now, let's look at the other type of tool called the one-to-one email tools. Examples of these one-to-one email tools include tools like Outreach, SalesLoft, HubSpot Sales Hub, which is different from HubSpot Marketing Hub, Apollo, and ZoomInfo Engage. Those are some of the most common one-to-one email assistance tools.
So how do these tools work? Rather than running large server infrastructures of their own email sending servers, these one-to-one email tools will actually connect to your email servers via an API connection and they'll send emails directly through your own email servers. So you would connect, say, Outreach to your Google Workspace account, or you would connect HubSpot Sales Hub to your Microsoft 365 account, and that will be an API connection. And then the emails will be sent through your own Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 servers. So if you connect Outreach or HubSpot Sales Hub or Apollo or one of these tools to your Gmail account and start sending emails to them and then you check the sent folder in your Gmail account, you'll see all of your sent emails showing up directly in the sent folder there, whereas you would not see that if you're sending it through Marketo or MailChimp or HubSpot Marketing Hub.
Implications
So what does this mean for you? What are some of the implications of this? One benefit of this is because these tools are sending emails as one-to-one personal emails directly through your own email server. The recipients of your emails will usually see their emails in their main tabs. So in Gmail, if they're using Gmail, it'll show up in the primary tab. If they're using Outlook, it'll show up in the focus tab rather than the other tab. So that's a big plus. But one big implication of this is that now you're responsible for following the email sending policies of your own email service provider. Like I'd mentioned earlier, Gmail for instance, doesn't want you using their systems to send large amounts of bulk email, so they will limit you to just maybe a couple hundred emails per day. And if it's a brand new email address, they might limit your sends per day even more. So it's impossible to send thousands or tens of thousands of emails per day through one-to-one email tools like this. So you get the benefit of having your emails come directly from you and show up in the recipient's primary tab, but in exchange, Gmail and Microsoft will limit the volume you can send.
Another thing that you will be responsible for is you're also now responsible for managing your own email domain reputation yourself. Just because you don't have a third-party tool like HubSpot or MailChimp watching and monitoring for spam complaint rates, that doesn't just give you a free pass. If too many people start reporting your emails as spam, you're going to lower the reputation of your own email address and your domain in the whole ecosystem of email server providers. And if your email's reputation or your domain's reputation starts to get lowered too much, your emails could start to get blocked by the spam filters of your recipients. So be careful. If too many of your messages sent through these one-to-one email tools get reported as spam, you might drop the deliverability of your entire email address, maybe even the email addresses if your co-workers too. So that's how a one-to-one email tool works, and those are some considerations and precautions you need to watch out for when using a one-to-one email tool.
When to use 1:1 tools
Let's talk briefly about why should you use a one-to-one email tool. What's the purpose of it? The purpose of it is to help you scale and streamline your own personal email communication, emphasis on the word personal email communication here, not bulk email communication. A great example of this is when you're doing sales prospecting. You could build up a list of people that you think are the most ideal fit prospects for you, build up a list of maybe a couple hundred people or so, and then you can write up an email to introduce yourself to them.
You can write up your email and you can send it to them directly manually through Gmail, of course, or you could use a tool like Outreach or HubSpot Sales Hub, save your message as a template in there, then take the template, customize it as needed for each of your prospects and then schedule it out. And that can help you streamline your email sending process and reduce the amount of copying and pasting and manual send clicking every single day. But don't forget that your email service provider like Gmail or Microsoft 365 does have the volume limits. So when you're doing that, even though a lot of these tools give you the capabilities of being able to do up to several hundred emails per day, you probably should stick with more like somewhere between 50 to 100 a day. You have to remember that your email, your personal email, like your Gmail or your Microsoft 365 is made for personal correspondence, not for bulk correspondence. And these one-to-one email tools are there to help you streamline your personal correspondence, but they're not there for you to just use your Gmail account as a giant spam cannon.
HubSpot Marketing Hub vs. HubSpot Sales Hub
All right, so we've been talking through one-to-one email tools and one-to-many email tools and listing some examples on both. I wanted to do a quick side note on HubSpot specifically because HubSpot actually has both types of email sending tools in its platform, depending on your configuration. Some tools like MailChimp and Marketo only do one-to-many email sending. Some other tools like Outreach and SalesLoft only do one-to-one email sending. And when we're talking about HubSpot, the HubSpot Marketing Hub tools are -to-many and the HubSpot Sales Hub tools are one-to-one. And so when you're talking about the HubSpot platform, you have to remember that it actually has both types of tools in there and you need to be specific about which one you're talking about to avoid confusion.
I see a lot of people get especially confused in this because they will confuse the HubSpot Sales Hub email tools with the HubSpot Marketing Hub email tools, and they will take, say, a list of say, 10,000 people and they want to email them through HubSpot and they go over to the HubSpot Marketing Hub email tool and they want to send it through there. But that's a great way to get your account suspended. You don't want to use a one-to-many email tool like Marketing Hub to send 10,000 cold emails. That will almost certainly get you in trouble.
You have to remember these one-to-many email tools, like HubSpot Marketing Hub, are designed for large volumes and they're running on their own email servers, and so they're very sensitive about spam complaints and unsubscribed complaints. So if you build out a list of 10,000 people or however many people and you want to start reaching out and introducing yourselves to them, you need to use the HubSpot Sales Hub tool, which is the one-to-one email tool, not the HubSpot Marketing Hub tool, which is the one-to-many email tool. And remember that the HubSpot Sales Hub email tools are designed to be an extension of your personal email correspondence to help you streamline your personal email correspondence, not just be a large-scale blast tool. So if you want to do prospecting to new prospects in HubSpot, use the Sales Hub tool, the one-to-one tool, keep it limited to probably no more than 50 emails per day.
When to Use Which Tool
So which type of email tool should you use in general? You should use one-to-many email tools like MailChimp or HubSpot Marketing Hub for your marketing email lists. They can be as big as you want, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people. They can be as big as you want, but you will need to track opt-in consent. You'll want to set up a privacy policy. You'll want to monitor your spam complaint rates, unsubscribe rates, things like that. And as long as you do all that, you can scale it up into millions or tens of millions of emails with no issues. So that's where you use the one-to-many tools.
Conversely, use one-to-one email tools like Outreach or HubSpot Sales Hub to help you streamline your personal communication. They have great tools to help you manage your personal communications, like templates, snippets, sequences, follow-up and reminder automations and other tools like that, but remember that all of these tools are meant to help you streamline your personal email communication and not just blast people at a large scale. Keep your email volume through these tools to no more than 50 to 100 emails per address per day, maybe even less. If your email addresses are new. Watch closely for spam filter notifications or complaint notifications because with the one-to-one email tools, it's up to you to monitor your own reputation rather than the email sending provider.
So with this understanding the email tools and all of the considerations in mind that we've talked about here, you should be all set up to start building and maintaining great relationships with your customers and prospects through email. So go out there and start putting them to use, and happy emailing.
