Knowing how to make a mailing list in Gmail is an important skill for any business owner. Your email lists play a vital role in your business, helping you connect with a variety of people. They allow you to send marketing emails, keep your customers informed about special deals, and maintain communication with suppliers, partners, and other collaborators. In short, email lists are an important part of your business communication.
Gmail is one of the top email systems used around the world. If you’re a Gmail user, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of typing in the wrong email address or forgetting to include someone in an email. This is where Gmail Groups can be a big help.
With Gmail Groups, you can put contacts into a group and give that group a name. Then you can send emails to everyone in that group just by typing the group’s name in the “to” field when you’re writing an email. This feature can make your emailing tasks a lot quicker and easier.
In this guide, we’re going to show you how to create your own email group in Gmail. It’s a simple process, and it could make a big difference for your business.
How to make an email list with Gmail
The mailing lists in Gmail are defined by assigning a label to specific contacts. Below we will describe all the necessary steps to create a mailing list.
Before we go too deeply into the detailed instructions, here’s a table that shows the key steps and quick overview of the process for making a mailing list in Gmail.
| Step Number | Procedure |
|---|---|
| 1 | Log into your Gmail account, select the all-app icon located between your settings and profile icon |
| 2 | From the drop-down menu, select 'Google contacts' |
| 3 | Choose the contacts you want to include in your mailing list |
| 4 | Find and click on the 'create a label' icon in the left side menu |
| 5 | Enter the name for your label and click save |
| 6 | Hover above the selected contacts and select them |
| 7 | Hover over 'manage labels', add the contacts to the newly created label, then hit apply |
| 8 | Return to Gmail and click 'compose' |
| 9 | In the address field of your email, type in the label name to automatically populate the contacts. This can also be done for CC and BC fields |
| 10 | Add your email text and body, then click 'Send' to distribute your email to your selected group |
Step 1: Log into your Gmail account, and from the top corner, pick the all-app icon in between your settings and your profile icon and click on it
Step 2: From the drop-down menu, select ‘Google Contacts’
Step 3: Then select the contacts you want to reach collectively
Step 4: Then on the left side menu locate the ‘create a label’ icon and click on it
Step 5: Then type in the label name you want and hit save
Step 6: From your contacts, hover above the contacts you want to reach collectively and select them
Step 7: After selecting your contacts, go above your contacts and hover over the ‘manage labels’ and add the contacts to the label that you just created, click on that label and hit apply
Step 8: Then go back to your Gmail and hit ‘compose’
Step 9: Type in the name of the label in the address field of your emails. This will then automatically populate all the emails you added to the label. This will also apply for CC and BC as well
Step 10: If you want to send an email to your selected group all you have to do is add your text and body and then click ‘Send’
Optimizing Your Gmail Mailing List for Effective Outreach
Creating a mailing list in Gmail is just the first step towards effective business communication and marketing. The real challenge lies in optimizing this mailing list to ensure that your outreach efforts are successful and yield tangible results. Here’s a comprehensive approach to optimize your Gmail mailing list for effective outreach:
- Segment Your Contacts: To send relevant and personalized emails, it’s essential to segment your contacts. Group them based on criteria like purchase history, location, interests, or engagement level. This segmentation allows for targeted email campaigns that resonate with specific groups, increasing the likelihood of engagement and response.
- Regularly Update and Clean Your List: Keeping your mailing list updated is crucial. Remove inactive or unresponsive email addresses and update contact information regularly. This helps in maintaining a high-quality mailing list, reducing bounce rates, and improving overall email deliverability.
- Personalize Your Emails: Use the information you have about your contacts to personalize your emails. Personalization goes beyond addressing recipients by their first name; it involves tailoring the content to meet their interests and needs, making each email more relevant and engaging.
- Use Effective Subject Lines: The subject line is the first thing recipients see. Craft compelling, clear, and concise subject lines that capture attention and give a hint of what’s inside. Avoid using spammy or misleading headlines to maintain trust and improve open rates.
- Monitor and Analyze Performance: Keep track of key email metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Use this data to understand what works and what doesn’t. Regular analysis helps in refining your email strategy for better performance.
- Leverage Automation and Scheduling: Automate routine email tasks such as welcome emails, thank you messages, or regular updates. Also, schedule your emails to be sent at times when your audience is most likely to engage with them, based on previous interaction data.
- Ensure Mobile Optimization: With a significant number of users accessing emails on mobile devices, it’s vital to ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly. Use responsive design to ensure that emails look good and are easy to read on any device.
What are Email Lists?
Simply put, an email mailing list is a subscriber list of addresses of customers that a business builds after customers have submitted their emails and opted to receive content and updates about the business through email. Besides offering updates on businesses’ offerings, email lists can also help in lead generation.
With Gmail’s mailing lists, you can assign a label to specific contacts. This allows you to group contacts based on specific lists. Grouping contacts is useful for the regular mailing of a specific list of persons. Essentially Gmail’s labels act like folders for your emails, letting you track the status of people’s tasks and help you to mark emails that need follow-up or emails that can be read at a late date.
In addition to helping businesses share news and find new customers, email lists are also a great way for businesses to build a closer relationship with their customers. When a customer joins an email list, they’re saying they want to hear more from the business. This allows the business to:
- Send personalized messages to the customers
- Offer special deals and promotions
- Share new products or updates
- Make customers feel special and valued
Plus, by using Gmail’s features, businesses can easily keep track of all these communications and make sure they’re talking to the right people at the right time. All in all, email lists are a powerful tool for any business.
More Gmail Tips & Tricks to Master Gmail
The video ‘Top 10 Gmail Tips and Tricks. Boost your productivity and master Gmail’ by dottotech is great to watch after reading this article. The video gives you extra tips to use Gmail better and get your work done faster. So, with both the article and video, you can do more with Gmail and save time.
Email is Still Tops in Marketing
Unlike outreach through social media, email marketing subscribers are six times more likely to get higher click-through rates through emails than through social media posts. It is important that businesses build their email list organically. This is because purchasing email lists could deter prospective clients, as people might mark your email as spam if they didn’t sign up for your list. Some benefits of email lists include:
- They make it personal: People are more responsive to targeted personal online conversations making communications feel more human and real. With it, you can address each user with their name, and send a personalized message.
- Customers still prefer emails: Even though several messaging technologies are available, people still prefer emails for business messages. Branded emails help to represent your business and help build your authority, credibility, and professionalism.
- Emails help build intimate relationships: Emails are the most direct way to communicate one-to-one with your customers. It lets your customers talk with you in person and ask questions if they encounter problems.
- Email lists can be managed easily: You can use your email lists to segment your recipients, follow through on conversations, offer targeted offerings, and much more with relative ease.
- Reach an already engaged audience: An email list can beef up your email marketing efforts to reach out to people who have signed up to your mailing lists to receive marketing messages.
The Perks of Using Gmail’s Mailing Service
Gmail offers lots of business solutions to give your business that extra edge. It offers features like email lists, group contacts, and mass emailing capabilities. Gmail recently revamped its platform to enable users to enjoy a clean, streamlined way to jump between their inbox, Chat, Spaces, and Meet.
Though some of its robust features come through its premium service, some great features come for free for businesses to capitalize on. With the free version of Gmail, you can send internal memos, team-specific emails, and even external messages to clients and partners. Besides offering ease of sending bulk emails to specific contacts Gmail also allows you to recall emails in case you invertedly sent the wrong email, or have typos in your email. You can do this by assigning a cancellation period for all outgoing emails.
Image: Envato Elements
Thank you, Michael. The Label feature is useful to know, though when I go to Contacts in my gmails accounts, a different (old) setup appears that has groups, not labels. Do you know how to change this to the Google Contact screen you show, and is there a way to create and send the email without all the email addresses being visible to everyone (aside from putting in your email address in the To field and BCing everyone?
Sheri did you get an answer? I need the same thing you asked for.
Gmail is very easy to use. I found that you can also do mail merge with it.
I find Gmail to be a reliable mail service provider. I get my messages faster because of it.
I have recently switched to Gmail as well. I agree. Some messages get caught up in Yahoo and other mailing providers.
Is there a way to create an e-mail distribution list without adding an individual to my Contact List? I would like to send e-mails to members of a non-profit organization to which I belong, however, I do not want to add all of the members to my Contact List.
Is there a way to label only one email of a contact, to create a mailing list? In your example above, what if Jane Johnson had a personal and a work email listed but you only wanted your distribution list to include her work email?
Is there a way that others, non gmail users, send to a gmail distribution list?
Can others send to my email distribution list?
This is inefficient and error-prone. Instead of going through my hundreds of contacts one-by-one and labeling twenty of them, probably missing a few, how can I make a mailing list by importing a list (in csv format or whatever) of the twenty I know I want to add?
Gmail lacks the functionality to add email addresses to a Group Email when they are NOT in your Contacts directory. I would have to add all the emails of, for example my volunteers, to the Contacts list and then add them to the group email. Lack of functionality. Easier to just BCC them all. Gmail needs to catch up with Microsoft mail. It does not let you have more than one signature, and toggle between several depending on if internal or external message. Easy fixes, but not in the program. Ugh!
Is there a way to forward an email to a label?
This system doesn’t seem to let you CC email addresses so, you end up with all your addresses appearing to everyone which is an inappropriate way to do it. I think they have not really developed this properly.