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GMass Server Maintenance Happening Right Now

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Hi there! You were likely directed to this post from inside Gmail, because you attempted to "GMass" an email campaign while we are performing maintenance on our core servers. We are doing this because GMass has been slower than we like over the last couple days, and we're putting in some measures to speed things up.

The email you just sent has been received by GMass and is in a holding area until our maintenance is over. At that time, it will be sent just like normal.

The maintenance period began at 5/11/16 7:40 PM CST and should be over by 5/11/16 8:40 PM CST.

If you have any questions, email us at support AT gmass.zendesk.com.

Update 8:29 PM CST- the maintenance period is over and all queued emails from the maintenance period are sending now.

How to handle this strange Gmail bounce: "read error: generic::failed_precondition"

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Several users have recently reported seeing bounce backs from Gmail that look like this:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

Technical details of permanent failure:
read error: generic::failed_precondition: read error (0): error


We've seen bounces like this for both regular Gmail users and Google Apps users using GMass. The error is a non-standard bounce message that is specific to sending via the Google platform. What causes the error? Nobody is certain for sure, but the Internet speculates that it's either one of the following:

  1. The remote server is rejecting the email due to an SPF failure. This is applicable to Google Apps users that are sending from their own organization's domain, not from gmail.com or googlemail.com.
  2. The remote server is rejecting the email because Gmail's sending IP is blacklisted, but Gmail doesn't want the end user to know that's the reason for the fail, so this generic message is delivered instead.
If you're a Google Apps user, regardless of whether you're using GMass, ensure that you have SPF set up correctly for your domain. That means you need to configure the DNS for your domain to allow email to be sent by Google's servers on behalf of your domain. You can check if your domain is configured allow Google to send email on its behalf via this easy-to-use tool. Just input your domain, and check the results. I just checked my own domain, wordzen.com, which runs on Google Apps, and noticed an issue, which I'm about to fix:

The SPF record for wordzen.com breaks the rules by requiring too many DNS lookups.
In the case of wordzen.com's SPF record, the record includes permission for Google's servers to send email for wordzen.com, but here's an example of a domain of a GMass user where SPF doesn't include Google's servers at all:



If you still see this bounce notification after ensuring correct SPF settings, or if you're not a Google Apps user, it could be issue #2 at play. Generally we've seen that the deliverability through Gmail's servers is the world's best, but it seems that occasionally even Gmail's servers get blacklisted.

How is GMass handling these bounces?

Since GMass categories all bounces and replies for you, and builds an internal Bounce list for your account in order to suppress future mailings to bounced addresses, we've added these bounces to our "Bounce Exception" list, meaning we won't count addresses that bounce with this message as a true bounce. That means that future attempts to send to these addresses will still work.

We've also deleted all bounces that were on the Bounce list in the past because of this issue.

References






New option to keep duplicates when connecting to spreadsheet for a mail merge

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Since I launched GMass about nine months ago, several users have asked me to make it possible to email duplicate email addresses in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. While in most cases, a user prefers that GMass de-dupe an email list, there are certain cases where de-duping isn't appropriate.

Now when you connect to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, there is a checkbox you can check which will allow you to keep duplicate email addresses.

There is a new checkbox to "Keep Duplicates".

If the Keep Duplicates option is checked, then GMass won't de-dupe your email addresses, and you can send multiple email messages to the same email address, with different values from the different rows in the spreadsheet. For example, let's say you're an after-school activities program, and you're emailing the parents of children who are registered for a program. A parent might have multiple children registered, and therefore the parent may need to be sent several personalized emails, all at the same address, one with each child's registration information.

An example of a spreadsheet where you don't want to de-dupe your list before emailing.

In the spreadsheet above, the parent "Joan Smith" has three children registered for three different classes. In this case, the program administrator wants Joan Smith to receive three different emails, one with each child's class registration information.

Note that when the Compose window is launched, the multiple instances of the address joansmith@yahoo.com are slightly altered by GMass so that GMass can associate each address to the right row in the spreadsheet. This is normal, and you should not alter the "-GMassX" tag that is added before the @ sign. When the emails are actually sent, these are removed from the email address.

After GMass connects to a spreadsheet and "keeps duplicates", multiple instances of the same email address are tagged.

New Feature for Google Apps Users: Branded Tracking Domain

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If you're a Google Apps User using GMass for your email marketing campaigns, you may notice that the domain "gm.ag" is used in your emails' open tracking, click tracking, and unsubscribe link mechanisms. For example, if you hover over a tracked link before clicking it, and notice the URL that it points to, you'll notice that it points to gm.ag, and then this redirects to the actual destination URL.



Now you can swap out the default tracking domain, gm.ag, for your organization's own domain. If your domain is mycompany.com, for example, you can set up email.mycompany.com, or x.mycompany.com or news.mycompany.com and use that branded domain with GMass. There is some technical setup required to make this happen though. Specifically you have to add a DNS record -- a CNAME record with your chosen domain aliasing to "gmass.co".

How to Set Up

After you've completed the DNS setup, just email me at support@gmass.zendesk.com and let me know your organization's domain (like mycompany.com) and the tracking domain you would like applied (news.mycompany.com), and I'll set all current and future GMass users from your domain to use that tracking domain.

Sample Message to support@gmass.zendesk.com:

Subject: Tracking Domain for uber.com

Message:

Please set rides.uber.com as the tracking domain for all @uber.com GMass accounts. Thanks!

What are the benefits?

There are two benefits to setting up a branded tracking domain:

1. A branded tracking domain creates a more trustworthy impression to your email recipients. Savvy Internet users hover over links before clicking them, and seeing the domain with which they're familiar (your organization's domain) as opposed to GMass's default tracking domain can go a long way in increasing trust, and ultimately increasing your click-through rate. The world's biggest brands use ESPs (Email Service Providers) to send their email marketing campaigns, and they all employ branded tracking domains instead of the default Email Service Provider tracking domain.

2. Setting up a branded tracking domain isolates your reputation from the reputation of other GMass users for deliverability purposes. Meaning, if a spammer uses GMass, and the spammer's emails contain the default GMass tracking domain, and this causes the default tracking domain to be listed by a domain-based spam blacklist, and if your emails contain the same tracking domain, the deliverability of your emails could be affected. If, however, you set up a branded tracking domain, that only your users use, you can protect yourself from being adversely affected by another user's actions.

Are you a regular Gmail user?


Even if you're not a Google Apps user, you can take advantage of this feature if you manage your own domain and send email campaigns with GMass from a regular Gmail account (your email address is @gmail.com or @goooglemail.com). The default tracking domain used for regular Gmail accounts is "www.gmss1.net", but if you manage your own domain, I can assign a branded tracking domain to an individual Gmail account similarly to how I can assign a branded tracking domain to an entire Google Apps domain. Follow the same setup procedures and send me an email at support@gmass.zendesk.com.

Why your Gmail "open tracking" statistics may be skewed

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One of the most frequent emails I answer from users is:

I was testing your open-tracking, and I know that certain emails weren't opened, but GMass still reports them as having been opened.

99% of the time this is because the user opened his own sent emails from the Sent Mail folder in Gmail. Doing so triggers the download of the open-tracking pixel, which is how GMass, or any email marketing system, knows if an email is opened. Opening the email up from the Sent Mail folder is equivalent to the recipient opening the email from his/her own Inbox. Additionally, if a particular email address bounces, and you open up the bounce notification, and the original email is underneath, then an open could be triggered also because you're now viewing the original email underneath.

How do we solve this?

I have some ideas as to how to provide more accurate open-tracking results in this particular scenario, but none is a perfect solution. Given that we're integrating email marketing into a Gmail account, this system is by nature different from a traditional email marketing system like Constant Contact or MailChimp, where the user would never have access to the actual sent email, and therefore couldn't accidentally trigger an open.

The primary method I can separate opens from the user in his Sent Mail folder from opens by the recipient in his Inbox is by recording the IP address that the user uses to trigger the email marketing campaign, and then treating subsequent opens that originate from that IP address as suspect. Even this seemingly simple solution, however, could lead to invalid reporting data. If in an office, there are 100 people working at their desktops, and the office has an Internet connection such that all 100 people share an IP address, and one person uses GMass to send a mass email to all 100 people, then it would be expected that legitimate opens come from the same IP that the sender used to trigger the mass email.

Therefore the best solution may be to count opens from the same IP as the sender as "suspect" and flag them appropriately, but let the user decide if they are legitimate opens or not. Enhancing reporting in this way is on my GMass product roadmap.

Secret Feature: Set the Cc and Bcc fields in a mail merge from a spreadsheet column

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Most GMass users know that you can send a personalized mail merge campaign using GMass and your Gmail account with a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Any of the columns in the spreadsheet can be used to personalize the Subject and Message.

Did you know you can also personalize the Cc and Bcc fields? Meaning, you can have each individual email message Cc'd or Bcc'd to an email address associated with the address you're sending to.

An example: You're sending 100 emails to 100 of your customers, but you want each email to be Cc'd to each individual customer's account manager. Each of the 100 customers has a different account manager, so you can't just enter a single email address in the Cc field of the Gmail Compose window. Instead, create a column called "cc" in the spreadsheet you're using, and specify the account manager's email address in the "cc" column.

Your spreadsheet might look like this:

A spreadsheet with a "cc" column. The email address in the "cc" column will be used as the Cc for each email sent to the "EmailAddress" column. Note that the "cc" column comes after the "EmailAddress" column.

Make sure that the "cc" column comes after the column with the actual recipient email addresses so that GMass doesn't accidentally use the "cc" column as the recipient To addresses (since GMass auto-detects the column containing recipient email addresses).

When you connect to the spreadsheet inside Gmail, the Compose window will be launched with the recipient addresses in the To field.

The Cc field will show as blank, but as long as you have a "cc" column in your spreadsheet, each email message will be Cc'd to the address from the spreadsheet.

The "Cc" field in the Gmail Compose window will remain blank.


Similarly, you can set a personalized Bcc address by creating a column called "bcc" in your spreadsheet. Again, make sure the "bcc" column is to the right of the column containing the actual recipient email addresses.

The default tracking domain for Google Apps users was listed as "deceptive" by Google over the weekend

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The default tracking domain that GMass uses for open-tracking, click-tracking, and the unsubscribe link for Google Apps users, gm.ag, was deemed suspicious by Google for a period of about 36 hours this past weekend. The domain has since been cleared and is now functioning properly, but there are some points to consider.

On Friday morning, May 27, several users reported that the domain gm.ag, was redirecting to a phishing warning page that looks like:




For GMass Google Apps users, gm.ag is the domain that is used inside your email campaigns to make open tracking, click tracking, and the unsubscribe link work. A different domain is used for regular Gmail accounts, so this particular issue only applies to Google Apps Users.

What does this mean?

It means that during the time that Google had gm.ag listed as suspicious, some links to gm.ag would take the recipient to the "Deceptive site ahead" page above instead of the actual URL. For GMass users, that means that links in email campaigns that have been click-tracked and unsubscribe links may result in your recipient being taken to this page instead of the intended page. From the "Deceptive site ahead" page, the user does have the option to proceed to go to the final URL.

The issue was temporary, and Google removed gm.ag from the suspect list as of Saturday evening May 28.

As soon as we became aware of the issue, we took two steps:

  1. We disabled the redirects from gm.ag to the specific phishing site in question and reported the corrective action to Google.
  2. We switched the default tracking domain for Google Apps users from gm.ag to www.gmss3.net. It means that all campaigns sent after we made the switch would use www.gmss3.net, but all campaigns sent before the change will still have recipients clicking links that include gm.ag.

Why did this happen?

It happened because a single user, a phisher, used GMass to sending a scammy email, and activated click-tracking to obfuscate the destination URL. The destination URL, which Google determined was a phishing site, has since been removed from the Internet.

Why did GMass allow this phisher to use GMass?

GMass is not a traditional Email Service Provider like MailChimp or JangoMail, where a team of people approves and rejects accounts based on the user's information. GMass is a fully automated system, and we intentionally do not police our users because:
  1. We rely on Gmail's own spam detection mechanisms to terminate users that are abusing GMass, and therefore abusing Gmail.
  2. We could never build a better abuse detection system than Gmail already has. Gmail has been doing this for much longer than we have and has access to much more data than we do to make decisions as to whether accounts are legitimate or abusive.
I consider it one of the great benefits of GMass. For you the user, you get the world's highest deliverability because your emails are being sent from Gmail's email servers. For me, as an operator of an email marketing service, I don't have to employ people to police users and approve/reject accounts.

What does this mean for me, a legitimate user?

It means you should take a step to isolate yourself from the behavior of other users. There's only one step you need to take to protect yourself from the potential bad behavior of other users. You should set up your OWN tracking domain that is used in the open tracking, click tracking, and unsubscribe links. That way, instead of gm.ag appearing, your own domain will appear. Your own tracking domain can be a sub-domain of your organization's domain. Click here to get started.

What about IP addresses? Do I need to make sure GMass's sending IPs aren't blacklisted?

No. GMass is built on top of Gmail, and all emails are sent from our users' own Gmail accounts. That means that the emails are sent from Gmail's own IP addresses, which are the highest deliverability IP addresses in the world. GMass is again different from a traditional ESP in this regard. A traditional ESP like MailChimp or JangoMail maintains its own sending servers and therefore its own IP addresses. They must police their users to keep their IP addresses clean. Because GMass is built on top of Gmail, however, we rely on Gmail to kick spammers off their network to keep their IP addresses clean, and they do an excellent job of this.

We are now hiding the Gmail Send button

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I've just addressed an issue that has frustrated GMass users since launching almost a year ago...accidentally clicking the regular Gmail Send button instead of the GMass button. Clicking the Gmail Send button by accident can expose members of your email list to each other and breaks personalization.

Numerous GMass users have at some point accidentally clicked the blue Gmail Send button when they meant to click the red GMass button. I have just updated the GMass Chrome extension so that the regular Gmail Send button hides itself in certain situations.

Specifically, if there are more than 10 email addresses in the To field, or if there's a GMass alias address in the To field, the Send button will be hidden.

We do this because it is assumed that if you have more than 10 addresses, it is likely that you mean to use the GMass button to send individual emails to each email address rather than the Send button where all of the email addresses would be exposed to each other.



If, however, you want the Send button back after it has been hidden, you can easily make it re-appear. Just add the special email address "ShowSend@gmass.co" as the last address in the To field, and within a second or two, the Send button will re-appear and will remain permanently in that specific Compose window. You can then remove that address if you wish.



To make sure you're using the latest version of GMass, just reload Gmail in Chrome.

Resources for GMass Beginners

Don't make this copy / paste mistake with Gmail and GMass

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If you've sent an email campaign with GMass, or even a test message to yourself, never copy/paste that message from your Sent Mail or Inbox into a new Compose window. Why?

Once the email is sent, elements of it are personalized to each recipient, like the unsubscribe link, the click-tracked links, and the open-tracking pixel. If you then copy/paste that email, which has already been tagged specifically for one recipient, into a new GMass campaign, then everybody that gets the new campaign will get an unsubscribe link that unsubscribes just that one email address, and links to click that will make it look like that one email address is clicking (not the actual recipient) and all opens will be registered to that one address.

In fact, this rule doesn't apply to just GMass. It applies to any email marketing system, even traditional ESPs like MailChimp and JangoMail. If you use a traditional ESP to send yourself a test email, never copy/paste that test email back into a new campaign to send to hundreds of email addresses.

What should you do instead?

For loading prior GMass content into the Gmail Compose window, use the Load Content dropdown.

Emails getting blocked? Take this one step to eliminate delivery issues.

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Overview:

GMass is a unique service in the email marketing space because it's built on top of Gmail. That means, unlike a traditional email marketing service like MailChimp, GMass doesn't have any email sending servers or sending IP addresses. All emails are sent from our users' Gmail accounts and therefore through Gmail's IP addresses. The benefit of this is that your emails are sent through the world's highest deliverability servers, since virtually nobody blocks Gmail's IP addresses.

This, however, doesn't mean that our users are immune to getting blocked. If the content of your email is deemed spammy, then Gmail itself may block your account, or your recipients' email servers may block your emails.

GMass doesn't monitor its users:

GMass intentionally doesn't monitor its users. Meaning, accounts don't need to be approved before you can start using GMass to send an email marketing campaign. Why don't we police our users? Because Google does most of the policing for us. If you use GMass to send spam, it's likely that Google's automated systems will be triggered and your Gmail account will be terminated. It's unlikely that we'd be able to develop a better algorithm than Google already has in place for detecting and terminating spammers.

However, even Google's spam detection mechanisms might not be fast enough in some cases. Lots of spammers succeed in using GMass to send some spam out before Google notices and terminates the associated Gmail account.

Your emails could be blocked:

Because of that, it's possible for your legitimate emails to become associated with a spammer's emails and for you to also get blocked. How are your emails connected to the spammer's emails? If you're using GMass's open tracking, click tracking, or unsubscribe features, then a "tracking domain" is inserted into your email to allow those features to work. If you're using open tracking, then an invisible pixel is placed at the bottom of your emails, and the domain referenced is the tracking domain. If you're click tracking your links, the links are altered so that the GMass server is hit first to record the click, and that's done by way of the tracking domain. Unless you've set up your own custom tracking domain, GMass uses default system tracking domains across accounts. Typical default tracking domains look like gmss1.com or gmss1.xyz. They are variations of the word "gmass" with the "a" removed, using various Top Level Domain (TLD) extensions from .xyz to .net to .com.

Some spam filters catalog domains that are commonly found in spammy messages, so if your emails contain the same tracking domain as the spammer's emails, then your emails can also get blocked.

The simple one-step solution:

The solution is a simple one. Your accounts should use a tracking domain that is specific to just your email campaigns. You can easily set up a branded tracking domain for your GMass accounts that is based on your OWN domain name, or if you don't know how to manage DNS records, we can provide a dedicated tracking domain for your accounts. Regardless of whether you have a Gmail account or a Google Apps account, you can take advantage of this capability.

That is the single most important step you can take to maximize your deliverability and avoid blocking issues.

A GMass Success Story

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Auto Repair Business Beats the Internet Coupons with Targeted Email Marketing


Larry Miller is a 30-year veteran of the auto repair business in south Florida. While the large dealerships and auto-repair chains called him a “technician,” he prefers “wrench turner” or even “grease monkey.” He told us recently that he worked very hard for others for too long, and always dreamed of someday being his own boss. A greasy entrepreneur, I asked him? He said he’s ok with that.


Larry took the leap and started his own business in 2014, taking many customers with him. He is a rare breed of tradesmen who follow the “always do the right thing” philosophy and his customers appreciate that….most of the time.


In his first two years in business Larry would occasionally run into a customer who hadn’t visited his

shop for a while and he would ask where he or she had been. Invariably the customer would reply “well, I saw a coupon on the internet from the big dealership for a cheap oil change, so I dropped by over there.” Dismayed but undaunted, Larry tried to figure out how to stop losing his customers to his former employers.

A friend told him about email marketing, so Larry started collecting email addresses from every customer with the promise that he would send news about special deals on repairs and promised to beat any coupon.


Larry tried one of the big email marketing companies, but had a tough time trying to use the graphic design templates. He also couldn’t figure out the tracking and other tools and was about to give up when he found GMass.


“Keeping a running list on Google sheets is easy, and typing up my monthly messages takes about 10 minutes,” he told us. “I keep it simple, the customers get my mail, and it’s really easy.”


Larry figured out how to add a column on the spreadsheet for dates-of-service and now he sends a mass email each month to customers who are due for an oil change or check-up.


“Basically I’m doing the same thing the big guys do, but on a smaller scale,” Larry said. I feel like I’m controlling my business, which is satisfying.”


Larry loves that GMass is free, but says he will gladly pay whatever it costs when the day comes there is a fee. “It’s a business expense,” Larry said. “But this one brings me a lot more more business.” 

GMass is an extension for Chrome and Gmail. It installs easily and is a very robust and versatile platform for sending mass-email messages. Click here to watch a video on YouTube that will guide you through the set-up.

GMass can provide you with a dedicated tracking domain for your Gmail account

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Hopefully you've read my previous post about the importance a dedicated tracking domain plays in your email deliverability. Having your own dedicated tracking domain is necessary to ensure that your emails don't get mixed up with a spammer's emails.

If you don't know how to manage your domain's DNS records, you need not worry. We can now assign a dedicated tracking domain to your Gmail or Google Apps account for you in the format of:

organization-name.gmss[X].xyz

where the [X] is some number between 1 and 1000. For example, if your company is ABC Widgets, and you would like us to assign your GMass account a dedicated tracking domain, we might assign you:

abcwidgets.gmss85.xyz

To request a dedicated tracking domain for your account, just email our support address.

In some cases, we will auto-assign your account, or your entire Google Apps domain, a dedicated tracking domain where we detect a substantial number of blocks. Every day at around 11:00 AM CST, we pull a list of users that have had 10 or more blocks in the last 24 hours. If the user does not already have a dedicated tracking domain assigned, one will be assigned to the account in the format referenced above. If you've been auto-assigned a dedicated tracking domain, you will receive an email from us that looks like:

If we auto-assign your account (or your entire Google Apps domain) a dedicated tracking domain, you'll receive an email from us that looks like this.

This capability is a first for the email marketing industry. Writing the code for this feature -- the auto assignment of dedicated tracking domains -- was no easy feat. If you're a software developer or otherwise interested in technical matters, stay tuned for a future blog post on how we developed this.

Did your Google account get suspended or did Gmail bounce your emails?

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With a recent increase in GMass's popularity has come an increased number of reports of Google accounts getting suspended after having used GMass. In most cases it's spammy behavior that leads to an account suspension. It's important to note that:
  • GMass can't control whether Google suspends an account, nor can it help re-activate a suspended account.
  • GMass is simply a conduit to unleashing the power and full sending capabilities of your Gmail account. GMass doesn't have the ability to skirt Gmail's rules or give you greater sending ability than you already have.
What happens when your account gets suspended or your emails get bounced?

We've found that there are different levels of bounces and blocking, ranging from Gmail bouncing your outgoing emails because Google determines they're spammy to a suspension of an entire Google account.

At the most basic level, Gmail might bounce your outgoing email with this bounce message, when you try to send:


You may also see this warning the next time you log in to your account:


Lastly, if your account gets suspended, you may get this email sent to your recovery email account:



How do you prevent your account from getting suspended?

The basic rule to prevent your account from getting suspended is to not violate Google's Terms of Service. These are some general guidelines that will help:
  1. Don't use GMass to send spam from your Gmail account.
  2. Don't set up a new Gmail account and immediately send hundreds of emails with it. Despite Google stating that you can send 500 emails/day from a regular Gmail account, you can't do that from a new Gmail account that you created minutes ago. If that was possible, spammers would certainly take advantage by creating hundreds of Gmail accounts and sending 500 emails through each account.
  3. If you've never sent a mass email from your Gmail account before, start by sending a lower quantity of emails and then ramping up.
  4. We've found that Google Apps account have greater flexibility with sending than regular Gmail accounts. We've noticed that even a new Google Apps account has substantial sending ability, allowing almost the 2,000 email daily limit, whereas a new Gmail account won't have immediate mass emailing abilities.
Ultimately each individual GMass user is responsible for his or her Google account. In most cases, if you're a responsible sender sending emails to people who want your emails, you shouldn't encounter any of these issues. Of course, there are exceptions. In rare cases, we've seen reports of legitimate senders getting temporarily suspended for sending a relatively low quantity of mass emails.

What should you do if your account is suspended?

Follow Google's instructions by filling out this form to request account reinstatement.

New Feature: You can now remove someone from an auto follow-up sequence

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Last month we launched our auto follow-up feature, giving users the ability send recipients an automated sequence of follow-up emails until the recipient replies or opens the email. Many users asked for the ability to manually remove a recipient from the auto follow-up sequence, and now that is possible.

To remove someone from an auto follow-up sequence, click the @ button at the top of Gmail to open the follow-up settings box. Choose the campaign that has the auto follow-up sequence assigned, and then click the "Edit Auto Follow-Ups" link, and then enter the email address (or multiple addresses, separated by a comma) in the labeled field and hit SAVE.

In this example, I've suppressed two email addresses after Stage 1 was sent, so that they don't receive Stage 2 even if they never opened the original email or the Stage 1 email.

Why would you want to manually remove someone from an auto follow-up sequence? Several scenarios come to mind:

  1. The recipient called you instead of replying to your email. You wouldn't want a sequence of emails designed to get a response to keep sending to this person if you're already communicating by phone.
  2. The recipient emailed you from a different address and started a new email conversation, which would prevent GMass from detecting that this person has "replied", since he didn't really "reply".
  3. The recipient engaged with you in some other way other than email or phone, so that you are now in active communication with your target prospect.

New hack to set your signature for Gmail email marketing campaigns with GMass

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A few months ago, we explained why your Gmail signature doesn't show up in the Compose window when the window is launched by GMass.

Now we have written a hack so that you can save your signature with GMass and so that your signature shows up every time a Compose window is launched, even if launched by GMass.

Saving your signature to GMass is easy.
  1. Hit Compose to launch a new blank Compose window with just your signature.
  2. In the To field, put "signature@gmass.co". The Subject can be anything.
  3. Then hit the GMass button to send it.
Compose a blank email, with just your signature, and send to signature@gmass.co with the GMass button (not the Send button). This will save your signature with GMass.

That's all there is to it! An email will have been sent to signature@gmass.co, and your signature is now saved with GMass. Any time you use a GMass feature to launch a Compose window, including "Connect to Google Sheets", "Build an Email List from Search Results", or "Send a Manual Follow-up Campaign" (the three red buttons near the Search field), the Compose window will contain your signature!

New Feature: Detect a person's first name from just an email address

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Back in April, I started piloting a new feature we invented to automatically detect a person's first name from just the email address.

Today, I am making auto first name detection available to all GMass users. This is a world first for email marketers using Gmail as their email marketing platform.

Just insert the personalization variable {auto-first} anywhere in your Subject or Message, and GMass will insert the recipient's first name, based on the recipient's email address.

Note that first name detection algorithm isn't perfect -- it works in approximately 90% of cases, and can only work if the actual first name is present in the local part of the email address (the part before the @ sign).

Because it's not 100% perfect, it is not recommended that you use the {auto-first} personalization tag as a standalone personalization technique. Instead you should:
  1. Set a fallback value to use with {auto-first}. For example, use {auto-first|Customer}. That way, if GMass detects the first name, it will be used. If it can't detect the first name, the fallback value of "Customer" will be used.
  2. As a further protective mechanism, and because even when the first name is present in an email address, GMass might not always choose the exact first name, use the "Just create Drafts" feature to preview each individual email first, before sending. That way, you can spot check the Drafts to make sure that the first names were generated properly before sending.
In our upcoming GMass Complete Guide to Personalization, you'll learn how to set two fallback values. Let's say you're connecting to a spreadsheet with the columns: FirstLastEmail. And let's say some of the values for "First" are blank. So in these cases, you want GMass to auto-detect the first name. But then let's say that GMass is unable to auto-detect the first name in a few of these cases. You can set two fallback values using this syntax:

Hi there {First|auto-first|buddy}


An example where the auto detected First Name is a fallback value to the spreadsheet column "First". The word "buddy" is the fallback value to the auto detected First Name.

In this case, if "First" has a value in your spreadsheet, it's used. If not, GMass will attempt to auto-detect the First Name. If GMass can't auto detect the first name, then the text "buddy" will be inserted.

The First Name auto-detection feature isn't part of the GMass interface yet, so you won't find a button in the Settings Panel to insert the {auto-first} designation. You have to type it or copy/paste from this post manually into your Subject or Message.

GMass Complete Guide to Personalization in Gmail Email Marketing Campaigns

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GMass offers a number of ways to personalize the Subject and Message of your email marketing campaigns sent with Gmail. From basic mail-merge style personalization to fallback values and automatic-first-name detection, this guide takes you through all of the options.

Simple Personalization

At the most basic level, you can use {FirstName} and {LastName} to personalize emails if you're sending to email addresses that are your existing Gmail Contacts, meaning people with whom you've had prior email conversations. Your Gmail Contacts contain names along with email addresses.

If you're connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, then you can use any column from the spreadsheet to personalize, like {Company}, {LastPurchase}, or {DateOfBirth} for example, assuming that your spreadsheet contains the columns Company, LastPurchase, and DateOfBirth.

You can use these simple personalization variables in the Subject and Message. GMass gives you one-click buttons in the Settings panel to insert personalization variables.

Note that the buttons will only insert the personalization variables into the Message, but you can copy/paste them into the Subject too.



Fallback Values

If you know that your personalization variables will have a value for some email addresses but won't for others, you can set a fallback value to be used when the personalization value is blank. For example, you could use {FirstName|Friend} in your message. If a "FirstName" is available, it will be substituted; otherwise "Friend" will be substituted. You can use the fallback value syntax, a pipe symbol, followed by the fallback value, with any personalization variable.



Google Sheets vs No Google Sheets

If you're connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, then you'll get separate personalization buttons in the GMass Settings Box, one button corresponding to each column in your spreadsheet. If you are not connecting to a spreadsheet, then you'll just get the standard FirstName, LastName, EmailAddress personalization buttons, where the values correspond to the email addresses and names of your Gmail Contacts.

Multi-word Names

Sometimes the names associated with your Gmail Contacts have not just two words, but three or four words. This is especially common in East Asian cultures. Therefore, in addition to FirstName and LastName, which will use the first word of the name and the last word of the name, you can instead use the syntax {Name1}, {Name2}, {Name3}, and {Name4}. Name1 corresponds to the first word in the name, Name2 to the second word, and so on.

For example, if you are sending to a Gmail Contact that looks like:

<loh@twitter.com> "Loh Kin Poh"

Asian convention dictates that you address someone by all three words of the name, so in this case you would use:

Dear {Name1} {Name2} {Name3}:

at the beginning of your message.



Auto First Name Detection

GMass has developed an algorithm that can accurately auto-detect someone's first name just from their email address. To insert the auto-detected first name, use the syntax {auto-first}. Again, you can use this syntax in the Subject and Message. In the below example we auto detect the first name and use a fallback value of "old friend" in cases where the first name cannot be detected.



Combining techniques

You can use personalization values along with auto first name detection and fallback values. For example, let's say you're using a spreadsheet with these columns:

FirstName
LastName
Email

Some of the FirstName values are blank. So for those, you want GMass to auto detect the first name. And in cases where GMass cannot auto detect the first name, you want to use "old friend". In that case, the syntax would look like:

Hi {FirstName|auto-first|old friend}:

The personalization tokens are tried in order they are placed inside the curly brackets. Fallback values should be separated by the pipe symbol ( | ).



Testing Personalization

It's easy to make sure your personalization is working before you send your email to all of your recipients. You can use the Send Test Email button to send a test email to yourself or anyone else. Then just check your Inbox, or your Sent Mail Folder, to make sure the test email looked the way you expect.

You can also choose to create Drafts first instead of sending the mass email. That allows you to spot check all of Drafts, one for each recipient, and then if the personalization in the Drafts looks the way you expect, you can click a link to send all the Drafts.

New option to send email mail merge to just selected rows of a spreadsheet

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When connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet to send a mail merge campaign, you can now specify filter criteria to pull only certain email addresses that match the criteria. Be sure to reload Gmail in Chrome to get the update.

You'll notice a new "Filter Rows" box when connecting to a spreadsheet.



This post explains how to use the "Filter Rows" box and what to type to get the rows that you want to select. Specify one criteria per line, in the format:

ColumnName=Value

For example, if you have a spreadsheet column called "Company", and you want to send a mail merge campaign to just everyone who's Company is "Microsoft", you would enter:

Company=Microsoft

Instead of the = sign, you can instead use the ~ operator to represent "contains". For example, let's say that your email addresses are in a column called "Email". You want to send to only @yahoo.com addresses. You could enter:

Email~yahoo

meaning all rows where the "Email" value contains "yahoo".

Multiple Criteria

You can also specify multiple criteria. Let's say your spreadsheet has the columns "Company" and "Position". Let's say you want to send to everyone whose Company=Microsoft, and Position=Manager. You would enter:

Company=Microsoft
Position=Manager

Or, let's say that in your actual spreadsheet, the Position column had values like "Product Manager" and "Technical Support Manager", but you still wanted to email everyone at Microsoft that was some type of manager. In that case you would set the Position criteria to just "contain" the word "manager". So:

Company=Microsoft
Position~Manager

In these cases, you want rows that match both criteria. So in these cases, the boolean operator should be set to AND. You might, however, want to switch to OR in certain cases. Let's say your spreadsheet has all of your customers but you want to send a campaign to only customers with an email address at a consumer domain, like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and gmail.com. You would enter:

Email~gmail.com
Email~yahoo.com
Email~hotmail.com
Email~aol.com

And you would set the boolean dropdown to OR. Meaning you want to send to everyone where Email contains gmail.com OR Email contains yahoo.com OR Email contains hotmail.com OR Email contains aol.com.

As another example, let's go back to our spreadsheet containing the company column. You're sending a mail merge campaign to executives at billion-dollar tech companies, so you want to only send to people where Company is either Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook. You would enter:

Company=Microsoft
Company=Apple
Company=Facebook

and set the boolean dropdown to OR. If you entered this criteria and set the boolean dropdown to AND, you would get an error saying that no rows could be selected, since there isn't a single row where the Company is equal to all three of those values, as that would be impossible!

The new Main Campaign Report shows your recipient email addresses, the original merge values, and tracking data

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We have just refined and relaunched a Reporting feature that details your email campaign activity in one CSV file. You can then import this CSV file back into Google Sheets, Excel, or any spreadsheet of your choosing.

The new Main Campaign Report shows your recipient email addresses, along with any other data pulled from your original Google Sheets spreadsheet, and whether each email address opened, clicked, unsubscribed, bounced, replied, were blocked, or otherwise failed due to an error or being over limit.

Access this report from the [CAMPAIGNS] Label under "GMass Reports" on the left side of Gmail.


Just click the "download" link shown above to download a CSV file of the report. It will look like this.

This is the actual CSV file containing all the reporting data for this email marketing campaign.

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