I learned the hard way about using Gmail for my Kickstarter marketing campaign.
First of all, Gmail only allows you to send out your email to 500 recipients. It doesn’t really state that; it just won’t send out the email if you have more than 500 email addresses. This means that if you want to send out your email to 2000 people, you will have to do it in at least 4 batches.
And that was my strategy for my Kickstarter launch. I set up my email with 500 email addresses and sent it out four times.
A few bad things happened:
- Gmail thought my account was being hacked because of the volume of emails going out. It went into SHUT DOWN mode and I had to scramble to complete various account verification processes to prevent my Gmail account from being shut down.
- Gmail would not let me send out that exact email subsequently. I’m not sure if it is because my email was reported as spam or if it was the volume of the emails going out with that exact same email.
The upshot is that a Gmail email campaign will work best for your Kickstarter campaign if you are planning to send out emails to less than 500 people. If not, definitely use an email marketing service, many of which are free.
