If you’re communicating on Outlook with over 500 employees, you know firsthand about Outlook email limits. Have no fear! We have all the info about Outlook’s email sending limits and what to do about them.
Many people are surprised when they first encounter limitations on their email sending in Outlook. You’ll quickly discover that you’re only able to send a single email to a fraction of your recipients, and that the limits of Outlook maximum recipients are holding you back. Yikes!
Outlook’s sending limits can hold back your internal communications, adding time and effort to a process that should be quick and easy! If Outlook email limits are a problem your organization is already facing, then your internal communications are in desperate need of optimization.
ContactMonkey is a powerful Mailchimp alternative and best alternative to Staffbase for email tracking and internal communications in Outlook. It enables you to go beyond the email limits imposed by Microsoft on your email newsletters.
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How Many Emails Can You Send From Outlook 365?
According to Microsoft, there are different limits on how many emails and newsletters you can send from your Office 365 account.
Outlook restricts you to 10,000 daily recipients. This limit works on a rolling timer, rather than a daily timer which means that your Outlook email recipient limits will reset 24-hours after you’ve reached them, rather than at 12 a.m. the next day. If you wanted to send more than 10,000 emails in a 24-hour period, you would need a third-party app dedicated to mass email sending.
The other limit is for Outlook maximum recipients for a single email or newsletter. The Outlook recipient limit for a single email is 500 people. This restricts the To, Cc, and Outlook Bcc limit. The maximum number of email addresses you can put in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields is 500.
This means that if you wanted to send to a unique group of recipients for which you don’t have a distribution list, you would be limited to 500 recipients.
In large organizations, this limit can add unnecessary time and effort to your internal communication process.
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Outlook Email Limits Workarounds
There are a few approaches one can take to avoid error messages in Outlook when sending to a large number of recipients.
Distribution lists can partially solve this problem. A distribution list is a method that enables you to send email to tens of thousands recipients via a single address. It’s super easy to create a distribution list in Outlook, which greatly helps your internal email efforts.
For example, if your company has 64,000 employees, your IT department could create a distribution list that includes any and all of these people. The distribution list would appear as everyone@company.com, for example. This lets you bypass the 10,000 daily Outlook recipient limit.
The problem with distribution lists is that they are difficult to create and edit. This means that if you want to send an email to a unique group of employees, you would need to enter their individual emails into the To, Cc, and Bcc fields.
Here you’ll encounter the other Outlook email limit: you will be restricted to 500 individual emails in those send fields. If you need to send to more than 500 recipients, you’ll need to send multiple emails, which is not ideal:
- Employees receive information at disparate times
- Email addresses can be overlooked when entering them manually
- Multiple emails are more difficult to archive and find in the future
Both of these Outlook maximum recipients limits can negatively impact your internal communications process. If you want to avoid needless time and effort in sending mass emails to your employees, then a dedicated employee engagement software may be your best bet.
Outlook Email Limits Solution: ContactMonkey’s Email at Scale
ContactMonkey’s Email at Scale feature allows users to send more than 10,000 emails in a single day without being limited by Outlook’s sending limit. Email at Scale also speeds up the send time for individually-tracked emails; you can now gather individual tracking metrics and personalize mass emails 16 times faster when using email at scale.
Not only does ContactMonkey speed up your mass email sending, it also allows you to supercharge your mass emails with engaging and responsive content.
Gather employee feedback
With ContactMonkey’s email template builder and pulse survey tools, you can create beautiful and interactive newsletters that help you meet your pulse survey objectives. You’ll also be able to choose from dozens of pre-made sample internal memos to employees.
Include company newsletter ideas like polls, surveys, pulse checks, emoji reactions and employee comments. Imagine getting feedback from all 64,000 members of your distribution list!
Personalize your emails
How can you entice your recipients to read your newsletter? Customize the subject line and message text with merge fields taken from the distribution list. This is a terrific email newsletter best practice that can easily boost engagement with your emails.
Track your emails
But how can you be sure your recipients actually engaged with your email newsletter? With ContactMonkey, you get in-depth metrics on your email sending. In your campaign dashboard you can see statistics like Open Rate, Click Through Rate, Opens by device and location, and more:
These metrics can be used to pinpoint your most effective newsletter content so you can maximize employee engagement.
Mass emails are a breeze with ContactMonkey’s internal communications app. So you can send with confidence knowing you are getting the most out of your Outlook.
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Manage Distribution Lists with ContactMonkey
Even though you’ve powered up your distribution lists, there will always be situations in which you need to send email to a unique group of more than 500 recipients not covered by an Outlook distribution list.
Remember, Outlook limits you to 500 recipients in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields.
You could always request your IT department to create a new one, but if you’re in a large company that could take a while!
Fortunately, ContactMonkey’s List Management feature allows you to create your own distribution lists without requiring the permission from your IT department:
Quickly and easily create custom distribution lists so you can send only relevant information to your employees. ContactMonkey’s list management feature integrates with Azure Active Directory or your human resource information system (HRIS) so you won’t need to manually keep your lists up-to-date. During your free trial of ContactMonkey, you can easily hook up your preferred HRIS, for example Workday, ADP, SAP, plus many others.
Sending to a CSV file
ContactMonkey gives you the ability to use CSV files* within Outlook. With CSV files you can easily create unique distribution lists of up to 10,000 recipients per email.
*A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a type of spreadsheet file that is used as an easy-updatable distribution list. You can easily add new headings like First name, Last name, Display name, and more to your CSV distribution list.
CSV files can be created and edited very easily. Open your CSV file in Excel whenever you need to make a change, and remember to save your work. Super easy.
These files can also be customized far more in-depth than a regular distribution list. Headings added to your CSV file will appear as merge fields within ContactMonkey. Want your email to address the reader by name? Want to include a birthday, nickname, or any other kind of quantifiable information? Merge fields are your ticket to super-engaging emails.
Tracking mass emails in Outlook
Now that you’re sending with ContactMonkey, you have access to in-depth metrics about your email engagement and performance. Email tracking is one of the most underused Outlook hacks within business today.
On your Campaign Dashboard you can view stats about your email campaign. Use this information to refine your internal communications process to spend less time creating content and giving your employees more of the content they want to see.
Employees that are actively engaged with the goings on of your company are more productive and can be terrific brand ambassadors for your organization. With ContactMonkey, all of this information is at your fingertips.
Send Mass Emails in Outlook with Confidence
If you’re regularly sending to a large number of recipients within Outlook, you know how frustrating and time-consuming Outlook email limits can be.
Use a dedicated internal communications tool like ContactMonkey to send mass email to your organization. You not only save time by avoiding Outlook email sending limits but you also gain valuable insights about how your employees engage with your email.
Working with a remote or hyrbid workforce? ContactMonkey is also a terrific remote teams communication tool that use employee newsletter templates to send amazing emails to your employees devices without error.
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ContactMonkey can also help manage your Gmail email limit in the same way. So you can optimize your email workflow whether you use Outlook or Gmail for business.
Understanding how to get the most out of Outlook is just a small part of a data-based internal communications strategy. When you combine data with responsive Outlook email templates and measure your results, you can know for certain you’re heading in the right direction.
Want to learn more about what goes into a data-based internal communications strategy? Book a free demo with one of our experts to get a firsthand look at our email sending and tracking software.
