The GMass Startup Guide for Email Marketers
Everything you need to know to send unlimited newsletters, announcements, and automations that hit the inbox
GMass is not the most traditional email marketing platform — but tens of thousands of savvy users are thriving as they use it as one.
They’re avoiding the exorbitant prices based on numbers of emails, contacts, and campaigns on pretty much every other email marketing platform — all while taking advantage of GMass’s hundreds of other unique, simple-to-use features.
Here’s your guide to using GMass as your platform for opt-in email marketing.
GMass Startup Guide for Email Marketers: Table of Contents
GMass vs. Other Email Marketing Platforms
Here are a few things to expect with GMass compared to the email platforms you’ve used before, like Mailchimp.
The quick summary: There might be a little manual work up front (in areas we’ll walk you through like template design and sending setup) — but after that, everything will be way easier.
GMass works inside Gmail
You’ve never used an email marketing platform before that works inside Gmail (there aren’t any).
There’s a lot of upside to working inside Gmail: Sending campaigns can now slot right into your workflow, you don’t need to learn a new interface, you send through Google’s high-deliverability servers, and lots of other little advantages we’ll cover throughout this guide.
However, since you’re used to sending your campaigns from another platform, this is an adjustment (at least for the first few minutes).
GMass doesn’t have a drag-and-drop template builder or submission form
This might be the biggest change of working inside GMass: There’s no drag-and-drop email template builder in GMass.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get well-designed email marketing templates into Gmail.
Along the same lines, we don’t have a variety of embeddable forms you can use to gather email addresses on your website.
But once again, we have a clear and easy-to-use guide to setting up forms to collect opt-in addresses and get them into Google Sheets.
You’ll send through Gmail, which has lots of pros and a few cons
The pros of sending email marketing campaigns with GMass: Better deliverability, more reliability, less likelihood of going to the Promotions tab, and keeping all your emails unified in one place.
The cons: Gmail has daily limits, which you may have to break depending on the size of your list. We have multiple ways to break those limits, but it takes a few minutes of setup up front.
We don’t charge you based on the size of your list
Email marketing platforms tend to start free or cheap — then the prices skyrocket once your list reaches a larger size.
At GMass, there are no limits on anything. So you can stop getting penalized for growing more popular.
The Basics of GMass
Quickstart Guide
We always recommend starting with the quickstart guide. In just a few minutes you’ll set up the GMass Chrome extension and connect your Gmail or Google Workspace account.
Then you’ll learn how to create an email campaign by connecting a Google Sheet of contacts, how to use mail merge, and how to send with the GMass button.
More basics?
You can get to know GMass even better by learning about the settings box for your individual campaigns.
You can also dig into the GMass dashboard, which is where you handle settings for your account.
Sending Unlimited Emails
As mentioned above, Google puts a daily sending limit on your account: Up to 500 emails per day for free gmail.com accounts and up to 2,000 emails per day for paid Google Workspace accounts.
GMass offers three great ways for you to break those limits (don’t worry, these are not just allowed but encouraged under Google’s policies).
Here are the three ways, in order of their popularity among our current group of email marketers.
Method 1: Using GMass’s opt-in sending server
Our team of deliverability experts here at GMass built (and maintains) our very own sending server.
When you use our sending server, you don’t have to worry about setting up your own SMTP server (which is great for a lot of email marketers or people who don’t want to dig into the technical side of sending).
And with our server, you can send campaigns of pretty much any size, flying right past Gmail’s limits.
We let people onto our server through an application process. As long as you’re sending opt-in emails, and especially if you have any history of sending opt-in emails, you should be good to go.
Important: You will be billed an additional $4 per 10,000 emails sent on our server. This will still be several magnitudes of order less than you’d pay on any other email marketing platform — but it is a cost we want to make sure you know about before you start.
Method 2: Using third-party SMTP servers
If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use our SMTP server, you can connect your own third-party SMTP account(s).
You can get accounts at SMTP providers like SendGrid, SMTP2GO, SMTP.com, Amazon SES, or many others — then connect them to GMass.
Now you’ll be able to break Gmail’s limits by sending through your SMTP provider.
Note: You’ll have to pay for the cost of your account(s) at the SMTP providers, and GMass again charges $4 per 10,000 emails to send through SMTP. This is due to the extra work this sending puts on our infrastructure.
Method 3: MultiSend inbox rotation
I’ll share this method because it is a great way to break Gmail’s limits. However, it’s much more of a technique used by cold emailers than by email marketers.
Inbox rotation (which we call MultiSend at GMass) is a technique where you distribute one campaign across multiple accounts.
So if you wanted to send a 10,000-email campaign, you could connect, say, 50 different Gmail or Google Workspace accounts to your GMass account. Then your campaign would be divided amongst those — so 200 emails from each account. And you can still see all replies and campaign stats in your primary account.
There’s no extra charge to send large campaigns through MultiSend. However, you will need to be on GMass’s Professional or Team plan.
Or… none of the above
If you don’t want to use a sending server or inbox rotation to send large campaigns, that’s also ok.
By default, when GMass detects that you’ve hit Gmail’s daily limit for your account, we’ll pause your campaign and then resume sending it the next day when your limits reset.
Deliverability
Obviously you’re trying to go to the inbox, and not wind up in the spam folder.
As an email marketer, you’re also at risk of winding up in Gmail’s Promotions folder. (Though that’s not the death sentence people once thought, it’s certainly less preferable than the inbox.)
Here’s how GMass helps with your deliverability.
Email verification
GMass offers unlimited email verification on every plan. You’ll only need to check one box on your campaign settings and GMass will verify each address on your list before sending.
Spam Solver
Spam Solver is a unique and powerful tool from GMass that tests your campaign on real mailboxes to find out what percentages are going to inbox, promotions, and spam.
Then it gives you tips to improve your inbox rate and you can re-test until you’re reliability getting there.
Custom tracking links
Custom tracking links are a sneaky deliverability (and branding) technique.
With GMass, you can set up a branded link for tracking opens and clicks in your email. It takes a few minutes to do and helps improve deliverability — especially since GMass is one of the few places that automatically adds SSL.
Also, it now makes your links more clickable because, when someone mouses over them, they show your domain rather than a random tracking URL.
Authentication
This is another thing that only takes a few minutes to set up but is important — especially if you’re sending high volume campaigns.
Make sure you follow our beginner-friendly guides to setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to authenticate your domain for email sending.
Embedded images
This is an under-the-radar way that GMass differs from the email marketing platforms you’ve used in the past — and how GMass helps deliverability in the process.
With other platforms, any images in your email are hosted on a server (for instance, Mailchimp’s). But because GMass works inside Gmail and uses its compose window, your images can be embedded into your messages.
Google likes that and it’s a nice little deliverability boost in the process.
Throttling
Though this feature is more popular with cold emailers than email marketers, if you want, you can add speed throttling on your campaigns.
That puts pauses in between each email that goes out, which better simulates a manual sending process.
Email Marketing Features
Now that we’ve covered the Big Two (limits and deliverability), let’s dive into the specific email marketing features you’ll use on GMass.
Templates
As I mentioned earlier, GMass doesn’t have a drag-and-drop template builder.
However, since GMass adds HTML editing capabilities to Gmail (no, it doesn’t have them natively), it’s pretty simple to bring in your own templates.
And once you’ve brought a design into GMass, you won’t have to import it again — every campaign you send automatically becomes a template in the system you can reuse in the future.
Segmentation
In GMass, you use Google Sheets to manage your contacts. (No cumbersome process of importing them and tagging them here.)
So if you want to send to only a segment of your users, you can either move them to their own Google Sheet — or you can use our filtering feature to only send to specific rows on your Sheet.
Drip campaigns
Want to send a welcome sequence or other automation? No problem.
GMass’s automated follow-up system is also set up to easily create however many drip campaigns you need.
Recurring automations
GMass’s recurring automation system is ultra flexible so you can set up any type of automated campaign you need.
You can set up everything from the aforementioned drip campaigns to automated messages that go out on customers’ birthdays or the anniversary of when they subscribed.
Scheduling
GMass has all the standard scheduling features you’d expect (scheduling for any future date and time, for instance).
But GMass also has some advanced scheduling features as well, including the option to skip sending campaigns and automations on certain days of the week or on holidays.
Unsubscribe links and list-unsubscribe
You can (and should) put unsubscribe links in your emails with GMass.
You can customize your unsubscribe link in individual emails, or set up your unsubscribe link to automatically use whatever text you want.
GMass also has a list-unsubscribe header option so you can offer one-click unsubscribe at the top of your emails. (That helps reduce people reporting you as spam — which is damaging for deliverability. The list-unsubscribe is also now required if you’re sending particularly high volumes.)
Integrating with other software
Need to integrate, well, any other software — from your eCommerce platform to a CRM?
GMass has a great Zapier integration you can use. If you want to get even fancier with it, you can use the GMass API.
After the Campaign
Now that you’ve sent your campaign through GMass, what happens?
Analytics
GMass offers full reporting with our analytics tools.
Also, we have (we’re pretty sure) the most accurate open rates in the business.
The Reply Project
Though email marketing doesn’t usually have as many back-and-forth replies as cold outreach or mail merge campaigns, you still may have campaigns with lots of responses.
That’s a great time to use The Reply Project — the tool we built to respond to campaign replies in record time.
You’ll see all your campaign replies in one screen, all already opened. You can write quick replies, or use templates or ChatGPT for even quicker ones.
Unsubscribe management
GMass automatically manages your unsubscribes. Don’t worry about removing unsubscribers from your Google Sheets; GMass will automatically suppress any emails you try to send to them in the future.
You can also manually manage your unsubscribe list, either to add or remove individuals — or entire domains. Plus, you can remove people from individual campaigns as needed.
Bounce management
And GMass also has automatic bounce management. So if you send a message that bounces, GMass will suppress any future messages you try to send to that address.
Much like with unsubscribes, you can also manually manage your bounce list.
Sending a follow-up campaign (say, to all who didn’t open)
Behavior-based follow-up campaigns are simple in GMass.
You can send a new campaign to a segment of a prior campaign based on their behavior. For instance, you could send a new campaign to everyone who opened, or who didn’t — or even who opened but didn’t click.
Plus More Popular Features for Email Marketers
While we won’t cover every single one of GMass’s features on this page, here are some others that we’ve found are particularly popular with our email marketers.
Mail merge personalization
Every column in your Google Sheet of contacts becomes a mail merge tag you can use in a campaign.
Plus with GMass’s sophisticated Google Sheets mail merge capabilities, you can even personalize links, images, or attachments.
Preview text
Good preview text can be an open-boosting complement to the subject line. With GMass, setting up preview text is as simple as typing it into the campaign settings box.
A/B testing
GMass offers inline A/B testing (no creating multiple variants of an email here). You can test anything on a portion of your list, from subject lines and text to entire images and CTA buttons.
Then you can have GMass automatically send the better-performing variation to the remainder of your list, or manually pick a winner yourself.
Triggered emails
Want to email someone when you know they’re in their inbox? GMass is one of the very few email platforms with triggered emails — automations that go out instantly when one of your subscribers opens, clicks, or replies to a message.
Need inspiration for how to use this powerful, underrated feature? We talked to some triggered email users and found 5 impressive ways email marketers are using them.
Team features
You can share templates, unsubscribe and bounce lists, and reports with your team (even if their email addresses are on a different domain).
Transactional emails
You can send any transactional emails through GMass — and even connect our transactional email SMTP server to WordPress or any other software.
Get Help with GMass
GMass is built to easily slot into your Gmail workflow — but still, you may find yourself with questions along the way.
Here’s where you can find answers.
Support FAQ
It’s entirely possible others have asked your question before. Our support FAQ is always a good place to start.
Searching the GMass blog
Every single GMass feature is explained in detail — often with step-by-step walkthroughs, screenshots, and sometimes videos — in the GMass blog.
We recommend typing your question verbatim into the search box at the top of the GMass blog page. Odds are, it will point you to your answer.
AI assistant
We’ve trained our own custom GPT on all things GMass. Ask it a question and AI will walk you through with custom advice.
Join our Facebook group
There’s a huge community of GMass users at our Facebook group. If you have any questions or need advice — on GMass, or any email-related topic — you’ll get help there.
Contact support
Our support team at GMass is here to diagnose and solve your issues — and get you back to sending your campaigns as quickly as possible.
Request a feature
Have an idea for GMass that could make your email life better? Let us know using our support form (choose “Feature suggestion” in the category dropdown) and we’ll have a look. While there are no guarantees, we’re always looking to add features that our users request.
What Else Can GMass Do For You?
While GMass is going to serve, first and foremost, as your email marketing platform — once you dig in, you should see lots of other opportunities to use it for other types of emails.
Cold outreach
We know a lot of opt-in email marketers are a bit skittish about heading over to the enticing but more “gray area” world of cold email. However, if you do want to try outreach, GMass is one of the most popular cold email platforms on the planet. Here’s our cold email startup guide.
Mail merge
You can send mail merge messages to large or small groups inside GMass — which is great for personalized, individualized customer outreach. Here’s the mail merge startup guide.
Email tracking and beyond
Once you’re comfortable with GMass, you may join the ranks of people who send all their emails through it — to take advantage of tracking and more. Here’s our startup guide for sending every email through GMass.