Blind carbon copy (BCC)

A blind carbon copy (BCC) is an email feature that enables senders to add several receivers without additional recipients being visible to the primary ones. Senders use this type of email when they want to keep customer information confidential. It’s helpful when the sender aims at sending information to a large group of people faster without them knowing the email addresses and names of the recipients.

In this article, we’ll unveil what blind carbon copy means and how it differs from a carbon copy. We’ll also list all the pros of this email feature and show you how to benefit from using it. Additionally, we’ll uncover several reasons for using email services rather than BCC.

What does blind carbon copy mean?

Blind carbon copy refers to sending emails to individuals without the primary recipient being aware. This practice allows companies to send emails to large groups of people quickly without letting all receivers know about it. It differs from traditional carbon copy (CC) which allows everybody to check the email addresses on the list of receivers.

The blind carbon copy helps ensure privacy, discretion, and confidentiality. When senders don’t want others to know about additional recipients, they use this approach.

Now that you know what BCC means, it’s time to reveal the difference between a carbon copy and a blind carbon copy.

Carbon Copy vs Blind Carbon Copy

In this section, we’ll uncover the characteristics of carbon and blind carbon copy and the difference between the two.

Carbon copy is an email feature that allows you to send the same email to several recipients and enables recipients to access the list of all email addresses that receive the same email. CC is useful for companies because you can send the same email to your colleagues and add a carbon copy for a supervisor to keep an eye on the working processes. This way, your employees see who received the email and let your supervisor monitor tasks. Yet, if you want to send an email copy to the primary and additional recipients without the primary receivers knowing about this fact, you’ll need a blind carbon copy.

Blind carbon copy is an email feature that enables you to confidentially send an email copy to a group of people without them being aware of this. These receivers can’t see the email addresses obtaining the same email. This email approach helps you maintain privacy and confidentiality.

Now that you know the difference, let’s proceed to the pros of using blind carbon copy.

Benefits of Using Blind Carbon Copy

Blind carbon copy carries multiple benefits for business owners. They all relate to privacy, discretion, and seamless interaction with prospects and clients. Here are the main of them:

• High level of privacy and confidentiality. When sending a blind carbon copy, you do not need to reveal the list of recipients you send your email to. This makes your emails confidential and private. This email feature ensures that the personal information of your receivers is secure, making it impossible for others to see email addresses.
• Less spam and solicitations. Blink carbon copy comes in handy when you need to send emails to multiple parties quickly without letting them access each other’s email addresses. This way, you prevent them from texting and sharing information you don’t want to disclose. As a result, you can avoid unwanted spam or solicitations among receivers of your emails.
• Less email clutter. Company owners using carbon copy increase the possibility of email clutter being forwarded to all email addresses on your list, yet the scenario is different when they utilize blind carbon copy. This approach aims to keep recipients’ contact data private and prevent email threads and clutter from ending up in the inboxes of all recipients on the list. When you use BCC, receivers can’t text each other and share unnecessary information.
• Professional appearance. By utilizing blind carbon copy, your company can have a more professional look without any leaks of information and unnecessary emails. When you text your customers with BCC, you can show respect towards each of your recipients by keeping their contact information confidential. Besides, the information you share with receivers also remains between you and your clients.
• Discretion in mass emails. Sending email newsletters with BCC enables you to protect the privacy of each of your customers. With its help, you can keep calm and be sure that no one on the list will see the information they don’t need to see, including the email addresses of all individuals. Even more, by sending emails with blind carbon copy, you can show recipients that you forward the information they need personally to them, making it look private. As a result, emails don’t look like spam.

Now that you know the pros, we’ll provide a short guide on using BCC in Gmail.

How to use BCC in Gmail?

If you want to send BCC in Gmail, you’ll only need a few steps. We’ll show you how in these short instructions.

Log in to your Gmail account.

Click “Compose” to create a new email.

Add receivers, email subject, and the body of your email.

Add BCC recipients by clicking the “BCC” button in the upper-right corner of your new message.

You’ll see an additional field where you can put all the receivers you don’t want to be visible to your primary email address. You can add as many emails as you wish by using the field below the main recipient’s email. Add commas to separate email addresses when you add multiple recipients.

Complete your email copy by adding text and attachments, finishing formatting, and sending your email. Click “Send” after completing your email and checking for typos and errors. The email will be forwarded to all recipients without primary receivers being aware of all email addresses on the list.

However, every email feature carries pros and cons, and blind carbon copy is not an exception. That’s why we’ll briefly discuss the drawbacks of this approach. Here are the main reasons for not using BCC.

• Trust concerns. Blind carbon copy might cause issues with transparency and trust. Since people can see that some of the recipients are hidden, it can cause doubt, suspicion, and additional concerns. It results in receivers feeling like a part of the mass sending of an email rather than a personalized approach.
• No personalization. BCC doesn’t let you apply a personalization feature, so you can’t address your receivers by name and send emails based on their preferences. It becomes an additional disadvantage and a reason for clients not to open your email.
• Suspicious email or spam marking. Since you can send emails to many recipients using BCC, some email services can filter your emails. If they flag your emails as suspicious or spam, it might influence the deliverability and reputation of your business email address.
• Limited analytics. When you use BCC, you can’t access tracking and analytics features to assess the success of your email campaigns. The situation is different when you use a bulk email service. SendPulse will help you gauge the effectiveness of your interaction with recipients and monitor their engagement, including open and click-through rates.

Every feature has disadvantages, yet you can still find solutions that will help you deal with them. You’ll need a good bulk email service. If you need to know more about such software, we invite you to explore the next section, where we’ll explain why using an email service is better than leveraging BCC.

Why is using an email service better than using BCC?

The two methods, email service and BCC can be used for various purposes, depending on the type of interactions. If you strive to improve communication with clients within your business, it’s better to consider bulk email software. Let’s find out why:

• no limitations on the number of recipients per day as in Gmail;
• personalization for trust;
• email scheduling to avoid manual work;
• integration with Google Analytics, chatbots, web push notifications, CRM, etc.;
• data import and export for higher efficiency;
• branding for professional business emails;
• inbox management to save time;
• customer support for a better understanding of the service.

These are only a few features most email services offer. Yet you can have even more for your business when utilizing a versatile solution like SendPulse. It’s an omnichannel marketing and sales solution for startups, enterprises, and individuals. Let’s discover its email features that will help you avoid using BCC and harming your brand reputation.

The service offers a drag-and-drop builder, so you don’t need the knowledge of the code to start creating your email campaigns. SendPulse enables you to build emails from scratch or use one of the available pre-built templates. Moreover, if you want to send less than 15,000 emails monthly, you can do it for free in SendPulse.

Log in to your SendPulse account to start creating your email campaigns. Go to the “Email” tab and click “New Campaign.” Select the mailing list and apply segmentation if you want to send this email campaign only to subscribers who meet your conditions. You can segment them based on email, previous campaigns, ratings, and statistics. Insert sender details like sender address and name and write your subject line. Apply smart personalization by selecting the variables.

Click “Next” to proceed to the email campaign template.

You can create your email campaign from a blank canvas or choose one of the ready-to-go templates. SendPulse gives you access to its library of templates for free. With its drag-and-drop editor, you can edit the template by adding or deleting specific elements within seconds.

Set campaign parameters and click “Next” to continue. Then, look through the information in your campaign and recheck it for typos and errors. Once everything is ready, choose the sending time and click “Start” to launch your new email campaign.

Check out our article for more detailed instructions on sending a good-looking email campaign in SendPulse.

Congrats, now you know what BCC is and why it’s useful. Hope that you’ve found a perfect solution for sending emails in bulk. Register in SendPulse now to enjoy the benefits of our email service for free.

References:

1. This article unveils the difference between carbon copy and blind carbon copy and how you can benefit from using them.
2. In this article, you’ll find out how to use blind carbon copy.

Last Updated: 25.01.2024