Melon Corporate Blog
The perils of using BCC for email broadcasts
A question we hear frequently is: “Why should I use an email marketing tool such as melonMail when I can just copy and paste the addresses into my email programs BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field or just use Mail Merge?”
One of the easiest mistakes many marketing staff make is misunderstanding how broadcast emails are in fact very different to the normal emails you send around the office.
There is unfortunately a misperception frequently from managers that email marketing is an amazing breakthrough not because of its convenience and effectiveness compared to other mediums - but because its FREE compared to traditional “snail-mail” campaigns.
It is true that the overall cost of an email campaign can be significantly lower than a paper campaign however, if you want any level of success from your broadcast its important to understand that its not as easy as copying and pasting then clicking send.
The very existence of the multitudes of specialist email broadcasting providers speaks testament to this - how could they stay in business if it were that simple?
The problem is, everybody is an expert at “normal” emails (emails that are sent between 1 or a handful of people) - which makes it difficult to recognise the differences between the two.
Normal emails are simple, straightforward and quite intuitive
Hopefully this blog article will help you recognise the dangers of DIY email marketing and if not demonstrate how valuable using tools such as melonMail (or even outsourcing your campaigns to us completely) can be - at least make you aware of how to avoid the most commonly made mistakes.
Before we start looking at some of the most commonly used approaches to DIY email marketing it’s important to stress just how valuable email marketing can be.
Many companies who have only utilised traditional marketing mediums in the past approach email marketing very ‘experimentally’, trialling a simple broadcast using a BCC or other in-house methods and then deciding inevitably that the poor results are reflective of either the medium or their customer base - when the real reason is that email marketing wasn’t given a real chance.
It is like someone trying to bake a cake in a toaster, then declaring that their cake was so horrible that this baking thing is useless at producing food.
These DIY vs a specialist approach can mean the difference between the equivalent of scribbling your company’s name on a piece of paper and tacking it to a telegraph pole - or designing and placing a full-page colour advertisement in a high circulation magazine or newspaper.
That doesn’t mean you need to spend thousands upfront - it just means you should take a professional and considered approach, for example talking to people who have experience in the industry, whether that is the experienced staff at Melon Media; or a friend who has successfully done email broadcasting for their own company.
DIY Method 1 To Avoid - Using the Carbon Copy field
Here is one of the first mistakes that many first-time email broadcasters make, formatting a fancy email in outlook and copying and pasting a bunch of email addresses in the Carbon Copy (CC) field and clicking send.
The main problem with this is that each and every one of the people you are sending to will also see each others email addresses.
This kind of thing usually isn’t a problem for normal emailing around the office as who cares if your office colleague’s know each others addresses - however when you are emailing to the general public (and other companies) they will probably get VERY annoyed that you shared their email address with other people they don’t know.
What’s even worse about this sharing of contacts addresses is lots of computer viruses listen to the email addresses that are coming into the computers infected by them and then email themselves to every address they find.
This means that this kind of broadcast not only threatens peoples’ privacy - it also risks infecting them all with computer viruses; even if only one of the people you originally sent it to was infected.
One of the other problems with this method is that email servers frequently decide that you have put too many people in your CC field, and just trash the entire email - frequently without even telling you it’s been trashed.
When this kind of thing happens and as you don’t have the reporting tools that are build into systems such as melonMail you have no way of knowing who it did send to and who it didn’t; meaning you can’t send it again at risk of sending people multiple copies.
DIY Method 2 To Avoid - Using the Blind Carbon Copy field
The blind carbon copy field (BCC) has become the inexperienced email marketer’s new best friend - unfortunately an ill-deserved reputation.
The purpose of BCC was not to give marketing staff an easy way to send lots of emails, but to give normal office emailers a way to send a copy to a third party without the addressee (the person in the TO field) seeing the address.
The side effect of this is it became a quick and easy way to avoid the above (See Carbon Copy field) problem of sharing everybody’s email addresses.
The biggest problem with BCC is that it simply wasn’t designed to be used the way email marketing staff are trying to use it.
Most mail servers don’t accept more than a handful of addresses in the BCC field with the side effects of going over this limit ranging from the emails just being deleted without any notification to you, or even worse moving all the contacts into the TO or CC fields!
This means that despite trying to avoid giving out all of your recipients addresses - you have anyway and made them vulnerable to spam and viruses just as above.
Secondly, by doing this it’s very easy to accidentally use the wrong field - and such a simply mistake can have major repercussions.
Take a look at activisions-sends-guitar-hero-message-forgets-to-bcc - an example of a company making exactly this mistake and becoming newsworthy as a result of how it annoyed customers.
For more information on using BCC correctly, have a look at Microsoft’s guide on using BCC effectively.
DIY Method 3 To Avoid - Word mail-merges
Microsoft Word comes with a tool built in called “Mail Merging” which allows you to create personalised letters or emails to a database of contacts and send them/print them as individual letters or emails.
Out of all DIY approaches to email marketing this is by far the safest to use *however* it is not without significant disadvantages compared to tools like melonMail.
Not only are you using a tool that’s not specifically designed to do email marketing (it is designed for printed letter mail merging but has the option to send it via an email instead of printing), it puts huge pressure your email server which are seldom resourced enough to manage the stress of sending email broadcasts.
It is not uncommon for a company’s internet connection to become completely inaccessible for hours on end when a single staff member sends out a mail-merged email broadcast, something that some of our clients had first hand experience with prior to moving to the melonMail system.
Remember, all of these tools do have their uses and their place; it just doesn’t happen to be email marketing.
As the adage goes: if it’s not worth doing right, it’s not worth doing at all. As with all things in life you can’t expect stellar results without putting in any effort.
Comments - oldest entries appear first, most recent entries at the end.
Interesting read as I’m currently using bcc to send out information to various stake holders, which I agree is rather cumbersome. However I’d like to know a bit more about the various “reporting tools” that you mentioned.
Thanks
AJ
By AJ Hawkins on 31 01 2008
Adam
I agree with most points that you make.
I do think though that a micro company with a list of 50 recipients is better off using bcc and sending out a newsletter than nothig at all.
However we have brought on many clients onto our melonMail system who were using bcc for literally thousands of recipients - most of them were unaware speciaist programs exist.
Kevin Garber - Melon Media
By Kevin on 05 02 2008
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