How To Send An Email To Multiple Parties

Introduction

In an organization, most of us are probably used to sending or replying to emails to or from one person or utmost two people in our daily communications. However, problems arise when multiple staff members would like to send email to each other perhaps in a collaborative atmosphere especially when discussing or crowd sourcing ideas. If you are having problems coping in such an environment, below are some steps on how you can send email to multiple parties with greater control on who sees what.

Step 1

Create List of contacts

The first step in managing your email communications is adding all people of interest who you will send email to in your contacts list. This way, you can easily add them to the addressee field when sending them emails by typing the first letters of their names. If you have contacts with similar names, save their details using names you are most likely to remember to tell them from each other.

Step 2

Create a Distribution email

The second most important thing to have when planning to send email to multiple recipients is a distribution email which you can name “Distribution List”. In reality, the distribution list is just a dummy contact while in the real sense it’s just you. The distribution list will come handy when you are about to carbon copy or blind copy your recipients and are unsure of what to add to the addressee field.

Step 3

Group your emails into categories

It’s also important to group your contacts into categories for ease of management and communications. If you have people in your contacts list belonging to various departments for example, you can group them into marketing, technical, sales, hr categories and so on. This will help you to efficiently target your messages to the appropriate group of people in your organization that you would like to send email to.

Step 4

Decide whether you will CC or BCC

The CC means carbon copy while the BCC means blind carbon copy and both are terms that have been widely used in email communications since the dawn of the internet. Basically, when you send email to people and CC recipients, you are allowing every one of your recipients to see who else has received the message. BCC however does the opposite, when you BCC the recipients, each recipient will only see the “distribution list” email hence adding privacy.

Step 5

Compose email and send to the various email lists

Once you have added your recipients either to the CC or the BCC fields, you can now compose your message and send email to your target audience as usual. Since the email is addressed to no one in particular, make it formal and address everyone through words like “Hello team” to include everyone in the conversation. It’s also acceptable to go straight to the topic at hand in a polite way to solicit feedback whenever you send email to your colleagues.

Tips and Comments

While most external email platforms provide mass email capability, it’s strictly monitored and you might face penalties if you are judged to be spamming users. To shield yourself from such risks, you can use more robust mailing list software like Mailman to send email to multiple recipients unfettered. Installation of the software can be done on a remote server or company intranet and is normally a simple process that takes a few minutes.

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