When you hear that Salesforce has a mass email capability you may think that you don’t need a marketing automation package to do that for you. Dig a little deeper and you will find that although Salesforce can send mass emails, there are a number of limitations that may have you looking back at AppExchange products.

Firstly, lets look at what you can do with Salesforce mass email capability.

You can mass email contacts, leads, users or person accounts. Lets look at an example of sending a mass email to contacts.

Here is the summary of the steps involved:

1. Navigate to the Home View and Tools Section
2. Select or Create a View of Data to use for the recipients
3. Select an Email Template to Use
4. Review and Confirm

1. Go to the Contacts Home view and look for the Tools section.

Salesforce Contacts Home Tools

2. Select or Create a View of Contacts for the recipients.

Note that the My Contacts and All Contacts views are available and you can create new custom views for use with mass email. Any views created here are for use with mass email and are not available on the standard contact screen. Also, any custom contact views created from the standard contact screen are not available in the mass email screen.

Salesforce Mass Email Contact View

3. Select the Email Template to be used

Salesforce Mass Email Template Selection

4. Review and Confirm the email to be sent

Step 3 is a confirmation step before the email is sent. It is possible to choose to send the email now or schedule it to be sent in the future. Giving the mass email will allow you to check on the status.

Once the emails have been sent, an email will be sent to you to confirm the emails have been sent, including how many it was addressed to and how many were actually sent.

Here are some considerations when you are using mass email:

Mass Email Limits

The mass email functionality is not intended to be used for email marketing campaigns sent to thousands of users. Depending on your edition, there are limits of how many emails can be sent each day (with a day defined as a 24 hour period based on GMT Greenwich Mean Time). Mass Email isn’t available at all for Personal, Contact Manager and Group Editions. For Professional Edition, the limit is 250. Enterprise Edition allows 500 emails a day and with Unlimited and Performance edition, it rises to 1,000 per day.

Other Considerations

Cost: The mass emails you can send from Salesforce (up to your limit defined by your edition) can be sent for no additional cost.

From Email Address: Salesforce uses the senders email address as the ‘from’ address. Its not possible to change this, so keep this in mind when you choose which Salesforce user is used to send the emails.

Tracking: Tracking can be enabled in Activity Settings for HTML emails. Tracking only works for HTML emails, as Salesforce includes a transparent image in the email that is hosted on the Salesforce server, and when the image is displayed Salesforce registers that the email has been opened. This doesn’t work if the user has disabled downloading images. Tracking records the date the email was first opened, the total number of times it was opened and the most recent date is was opened.

Tracking is displayed against the contact in the HTML Email Status related list. After an email is sent, a record will be created that will show when the email was sent.

After the email has been opened, the record will be updated with the open date, number of times opened and the last opened date.