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How to Send Bulk Email: Planning and Sending Your First Broadcast

A bulk email broadcast is one message sent to your whole subscriber list, or a targeted slice of it, paced through the day the way inbox providers expect from a legitimate sender. This guide walks through sending a broadcast with Email Campaign Engine, the free open source engine behind our Email Broadcast app. The same steps apply to the hosted version, since it runs the same engine.

Before You Start

Four things need to be in place before your first broadcast:

A running install. Either the open source Email Campaign Engine on your own hosting (the documentation covers Docker and shared hosting setup in a few minutes), or the hosted Email Broadcast app.
A connected provider. You need a sending domain configured with SMTP credentials from one of the 11 supported providers, or any standard SMTP relay. Start with how to connect an email provider if that is not done.
Authentication on the domain. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records set up with your provider. Without them, Gmail and Yahoo will junk or drop your mail no matter what you write. The authentication guide covers all three.
Opted-in contacts. Every address must have agreed to hear from you. Purchased lists contain spam traps that can end your sending reputation in one campaign.

Step 1: Load Your Contacts

Upload in the admin area or push through the API. The admin contacts page accepts bulk uploads, and the API has contacts/add for wiring up a signup form plus contacts/upload for bulk imports. Give every contact a feed tag, a short code naming where the contact came from, like newsletter-form or checkout. Feeds let you filter broadcasts later and trace results back to a source.

The engine keeps a profile on every address: ISP group, name, send count, message history, and an activity level that upgrades from inactive to clicker or converter as they engage. When a broadcast has fewer slots than you have contacts, engaged people are queued first, which also happens to be exactly what protects your sender reputation.

Step 2: Write the Message

Subject line first, then the body. The subject line decides whether the message gets opened at all. In the body, keep one clear call to action, wrap your links in the click tracker, and include the unsubscribe placeholder and your postal address, both are legal requirements for commercial email.

The placeholders do the personal touches: ##FNAME## becomes the first name, ##UNSUB## becomes a hosted one-click unsubscribe link that also rides in the List-Unsubscribe header so mail clients show their native unsubscribe button, and a tracked link is written as https://yourdomain.com/click.php/##SUBID## so every click is counted and your landing page receives the tracking id.

The unsubscribe link is your friend. A subscriber who quietly leaves through one click does no damage. A subscriber who cannot find the unsubscribe link hits "mark as spam" instead, and complaints above 0.1% get your whole program filtered. Make leaving easy and your deliverability stays healthy. More in bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes.

Step 3: Create a List

A list is a sending profile. It defines who a broadcast targets, optionally filtered by feed and state. Create one list per audience you regularly send to, so your promotional sends, your newsletter, and your customer announcements each have a clean audience definition.

Step 4: Schedule the Broadcast

Pick the list, the message, and the volume. From the dashboard, choose how many emails to send today. The engine fills the queue from the list, engaged contacts first, and spreads the sends across the business day rather than dumping everything at once.

That pacing matters more in email than almost anywhere else. Sending 50,000 messages in 30 seconds trips rate limits and filters at every major inbox provider. The same volume spread over the day looks like normal sending behavior. If you are warming a new domain, start with small volumes to your most engaged contacts and grow week over week, the domain warming guide has the schedule.

The auto scheduler can take over the routine entirely: turned on in settings, it builds the day's broadcasts by itself, one per list, rotating through the messages you enabled for that weekday. Developers can also schedule programmatically with the broadcast/schedule endpoint, documented with examples in the API reference.

Step 5: Watch Delivery and Results

The webhooks tell you what actually happened. Provider callbacks record delivered, soft and hard bounces, opens, clicks, complaints, and unsubscribes as they occur. Hard bounces and complaints suppress the address automatically, so the list cleans itself as you send. The daily stats put it all in one report.

Read the numbers against the usual baselines: delivery above 95%, opens 20% to 30% for most marketing email, clicks 2% to 5%, complaints under 0.1%. A delivery rate falling short usually means list quality or reputation, and a complaint spike means targeting or frequency. The email broadcast overview covers what each metric is telling you.

Email Campaign Engine is free and open source. Install it in minutes and send your first campaign today.

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Prefer it managed? Contact our team about the hosted Email Broadcast app.