PRO TIPS
Sending List Emails

A headshot for Max Hampton, a Prolocity Consultant

Jay Mehta
PROserve Essential Lead

 

Marketing tools like Marketing Cloud are great for large-scale email needs where you need to send to thousands of people at a time, but they can be overly complicated if you just need to send emails to a few people at a time–for instance, sending an email to a few dozen Contacts or Leads at once.

That's where the Salesforce List Email feature can come in handy. If they're enabled in your org, you can quickly build a List View of Contacts or Leads and then send a message that can be personalized to them. They present a handy alternative to, for instance, copying a list of emails into Outlook to send an email.

Before we get much further, there are a few key limitations to the list email tool you should know:

  1. Salesforce isn't designed to be a mass email tool! There is a daily (based on the 24 hour period beginning at midnight UTC) limit of 5,000 emails per org that can be sent via list email and tools like the Flow SendEmail action. List emails are, therefore, very much designed for small-scale sends, not emailing your whole database. Salesforce will show you how close you are to the limit in the compose window.
  2. To that end, because you can only select 200 records in a List View, you can't send to more than 200 people in one message
  3. If you need to send attachments, list emails may not be the right choice. When you "attach" files to an email sent via list email, the recipient doesn't receive the file in the email. Instead, they receive an HTML file that contains a link to download the files. This is sometimes confusing to users or may trigger email security software. If you need attachments, there's likely a better alternative.

If those limits aren't an issue, let's look at how to send a list email! You can watch the video below or follow along with the step-by-step instructions.

Step 1: Build a List View

List Views are the lists of records that you see when clicking on an object tab like Contacts or Leads. You can send a list email to either type of object. For this example, we'll send an email to all Leads that were created this week, but that we haven't yet contacted.

  1. Click Leads
  2. Click the gear drop-down menu above the list view (not the one at the top of the page)
  3. From the drop-down menu, select New
  4. We'll give this a descriptive name, like Recent Uncontacted Leads
  5. Click Save

Now that we've built a list view, we can set up some filters by clicking the Filter icon at the top right. We'll now add our filters.

  1. Click Add Filter
  2. Select Lead Status from the menu
  3. Select the status(es) you are interested in. For this example, we'll select Open - Not Contacted
  4. Click Done
  5. Click Add Filter again
  6. Select Created Date from the menu
  7. In the filter box, we'll enter the relative date THIS WEEK, which will ensure that we don't have to keep changing the date in the filter
  8. Click Done, and then click Save on the filter.

Now we have a list view that will show one or more leads, which means we can send a list email to them.

Step 2: Select Recipients

From the list view, you can select the recipients of your message by clicking the checkboxes next to the names. Remember, because you can only select 200 records at once from a list view, you can only send to up to 200 people at once. After you've selected the proper recipients, click the Send List Email button above the list view (it may appear in the drop-down menu depending on your organization's configuration).

 

The Lead list view, showing that the user has checked the box next to two leads, and clicked a drop-down menu above the list view exposing a menu. The user will select the Send List Email option from the menu.

Step 3: Compose your message

An email composer will appear on the screen. Here you can set the subject and body of your message, including using rich text formatting like bold, underline, and colors. You can also insert images but remember, attachments don't actually end up attached to the message.

One of the best features of the list email editor is that you can insert merge fields to personalize your message. You do this by clicking the Insert Merge Field button at the bottom left of the composer.

The Insert Merge field button, found at the bottom left of the email composer, resembles a pair of curly braces.

A new pane appears that will allow you to pick a merge field. For this example, we've inserted the recipient's name and company into the message, resulting in a message that looks like this:

 

The email composer window, showing a sample message asking the contact for a brief phone call. The message contains merge fields for the lead's first name and company.

After placing merge fields, it's a good idea to check what they'll look like for your recipients. You can do this by clicking the Review tab. When you do that, Salesforce will show you a list of all of the recipients that you selected. You can click a recipient to preview the personalized email that person will receive:

The Review tab of the email composer allows users to select a recipient and see a preview of the personalized email that person will receive. In this example, the user is previewing an email addressed to Johnny Test showing the person's name and company merged into the body of the message.

After you've clicked through a few preview records, you can click send to send out your emails.

But wait! Before you hit send, you may want to save this message as a template that you can use again in the future. To do that, click the Content tab again, and click the template button at the bottom left of the composer:

The Insert Template button at the bottom left of the Lightning Email composer.

From that menu, you can select Save as new template... Depending on your permissions, you may be able to save templates in public folders (so that other users can use them) or only in a private folder. After saving a template, you can select it the next time you send a list email by clicking the template button and selecting Insert a template...

Step 4: Send it!

Now that we've completed our email and optionally saved it as a reusable template, we can hit the send button to send the messages immediately. But even here we have an option–emails can be scheduled to be sent at a later date by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the Send button. Doing so pops up a new pane that allows you to pick the date, time, and time zone to be used to send the message:

 

The Send Later pane, which gives options for Date, Time, and Time Zone.

Wrap Up & Next Steps

Sending list emails from list views is just the start. They're also available to send to members of Campaigns in Salesforce, which enables more advanced segmentation (for example, creating a campaign for every Contact that has been linked to an Opportunity in the past year). We'll cover campaign setup and segmentation in a future PRO Tips.