GMass Review & Tutorials 2022

Buzz. Stream.

Those were the two words I kept seeing over and over when I was first getting started with white hat link building.

If you wanted to scale outreach, this was the tool to do it.

All the “big guys” in the SEO space were using it. And if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.

So I took the plunge. I slammed my wallet on the desk, whipped out my credit card and paid a month’s subscription to BuzzStream.

Man, I was excited.

This was the missing piece of the puzzle. The thing that would take me from a desperate niche site owner to a site-building, profit-driving internet tycoon.

If I could just build those links, the moolah would follow.

My legs bouncing up and down like a couple of pistons, I fired up the website and punched in my credentials. This was going to be the key moment, The moment where everything would start to make sense.

And there I was, inside BuzzStream.

I poked around. Then I poked around some more.

After several hours, I managed to set up a campaign, find some “influencers” in my niche and send out a grand total of 23 well-crafted emails. Each one complete with name, email address and a side order of personalization.

The stage was set and I watched the clock like a school kid in detention.

How many responses did I get back?

Two.

How many links did that equate to?

Zero. Nada. Zilch.

I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. How could I have invested so much time without having a single damn link to show for it?

I didn’t know it at the time, but the answer was… speed.

(No, I didn’t take any drugs)

I mean looking looking at what areas consume the most time and cutting it down to a point where it becomes scalable. And BuzzStream just isn’t built for speed. It’s built for organization.

That’s great if you run a large agency, but I was just a guy working solo. All I wanted to do was build some links, fast.

For me, it was all about the links per hour.

Enter, Gmass

GMass hit the scenes in August, 2015.

It was created by Ajay Goel after becoming frustrated with the lackluster email outreach tools available. Everything else was sucky, overly-complicated or part of a much larger product.

He wanted something super-simple, but also super-powerful. So he built a lightweight Gmail application designed to send emails scale, without all the fuss.

GMass was an immediate hit for folks doing any kind of mass outreach and has amassed (see what I did there?) a user-base of over 26,000 in just over 1 year.

So that’s the backstory, but let’s get into the tool itself. I shot a video to give you a quick rundown of it.

GMass Review: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

For this review, I fired up GMass and asked myself the question, “how well does this thing really work for building links at scale?”

But more than that, I wanted to put GMass toe-to-toe with the other popular outreach tools on the market to see how it compares. Of course, I’ll also give my opinion on what I liked and didn’t like along the way.

Understanding GMass Limitations

As I mentioned in this roundup post, not all outreach tools are created equal.

Some outreach tools offer an all-in-one solution that covers each phase of the outreach process, others are dedicated tools that only handle outreach.

GMass is a dedicated outreach tool.

It’s important to understand because that essentially makes 100% useless for anything other than outreach, which means:

• You still need find prospects
• You still need to find contact information for those prospects
• And you still need to present the data in a way GMass understands

Like I said, I covered this in way more detail in this post, so make sure you check it out if this is a concern for you.

Leverage The Power Of Gmail

Not unlike some other outreach tools, GMass is a chrome extension that plugs straight into the largest and most powerful email service in the world. Gmail.

Just download the extension, head over to your inbox and you’ll see the GMass buttons appear in your Gmail interface.

There’s no fancy user interface or external application, it all runs seamlessly inside the familiar Gmail interface.

In fact, the closest we get to a GMass “interface” is the popup campaign settings in the compose window.

This has actually gone through a few iterations, but it still kinda feels like I’m running on Windows 98.

If you’ve ever used BuzzStream, you know it’s a tad more up to date.

And I particularly like MailShake’s (formerly Connector) interface.

That’s the thing about GMass, it’s never going to win any design awards. But you learn to look past then when you realize that’s not what this tool is about.

It’s about turning your run of the mill Gmail account into an unrelenting, all guns blazing, outreach machine.

Personalization On Steroids With Mail Merge

Whether it’s just adding a name, a link, or even whole sentences – you can easily make that happen using mail merge with GMass.

Mail merge is the process of automatically pulling information from a single database for each individual recipient, so you can quickly and easily personalize your emails at scale.

With GMass, that database comes in the form of a Google Sheet.

All you need to do is create a new sheet with your custom fields, like this:

And connect that sheet by clicking a button from your Gmail interface:

Once you click “connect to spreadsheet”, GMass will then go ahead and use the data from your Google sheet to build out a send list.

Now just write out your subject and body message using the personalized elements as text replacements.

(It’s just a case of referencing the column headings in your Google sheet)

Finally, hit the red “GMass” button to send a personalized email to each individual recipient on your list.

Note: Do NOT use the regular send button, that will break your text replacements and show all email addresses to every sender. Very bad idea.

I also love how you can make changes to the sheet even after you’ve connected it, and GMass will check the sheet for updates when you eventually start the campaign.

Playing It Safe With Large Campaigns

When it comes to setting up a campaign with a hefty number of prospects, things can get a little scary.

GMass being as powerful as it is means one wrong click could sabotage your entire campaign, not to mention tarnish some relationships.

(Trust me, I’ve been there. Got the t-shirt)

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do with GMass to avoid making a complete mess of it.

It all starts with the campaign settings.

The first thing you’ll notice is the personalization fields which have been pulled from the columns in your Google sheet.

Clicking any of those will insert it directly into your compose window.

If you’re ever unsure about what you used for your column heading, this is what you need to do to avoid any issues.

This next one is kinda obvious but it’s something I’m sure most people tend to ignore – and that’s sending a test email.

It literally takes a few seconds and you’d be surprised how easily you spot problems on the front end versus the compose window. I ALWAYS run a quick test email before sending the campaign, and you should too.

(The text replacements won’t work in the test email unless you added that email to your Google sheet. So yeah, it’s a good idea to do that)

Moving on. Let’s talk about drafts.

If you really want to play it safe, running the campaign in draft mode will create all the emails and store them under drafts so you can review each one before sending.

This process feels a bit messy and as far as I know, you can’t send multiple drafts at once – which kinda defeats object of using GMass.

MailShake provides a much better solution by giving you a preview during campaign setup.

To me, this highlights one of the biggest flaws of having GMass rest on a third-party interface. It’s inherently bound by the rules of Gmail and it makes things like this extremely difficult to implement – if not impossible.

Either way, if you follow these steps and use the safety net provided by GMass, you’ll be much less likely to mess up a campaign.

And I should say, Ajay – the founder behind GMass – seems to be making a conscious effort to tackle these problems, which is always good to see.

For example, one massive mistake people used to make when sending a campaign using the standard ‘Send’ button, instead of the red GMass button.

So what did Ajay do?

He put a safety trigger in place to automatically hide the regular Gmail send button if you’re sending to more than 20 recipients.

There you have it. One less worry for anyone jumping on the GMass train today.

Double-Down On Winning Campaigns With Tracking

One of the biggest advantages of using an outreach tool over your standard email service is the built-in tracking.

To track your campaigns with GMass, just turn on the tracking options in the campaign settings.

And you’ll be able to check the numbers under the “Gmass report” label in the sidebar.

This it what it looks like:

And you can also download your reports to a CSV file if you prefer to keep a local record of everything.

GMass reporting is about as elegant as my girlfriends dancing after a few tequila shots – but it gets the job done.

(Still, it makes you appreciate MailShakes reporting UI)

Dodging Spam Filters With High-Deliverability

I spoke about the importance of deliverability in the roundup review, but I wanted to highlight it for GMass specifically.

You already know that it’s one of the most important aspects of email outreach, which is why it’s a really big deal when GMass promises the best deliverability rates of any email marketing tool, ever.

That’s a bold promise. So how do they back it up?

Answer: using a dedicated tracking domain.

A tracking domain is essentially a DNS record, and it’s used to keep tabs the number of opens and clicks you get for every email sent.

This is what a default tracking domain looks like when you hover over the link in an outreach email:

This is the same tracking domain that every user is assigned by default. If that domain develops a bad reputation, everyone’s deliverability suffers.

That’s where custom tracking domains come in. Just send a request to GMass for a custom tracking domain and one will be assigned to you and you alone. This is how – GMass claims – you can achieve 100% deliverability.

Here’s a quick tutorial on exactly how to set that up.

And if you really want to take it a step further, you can set up a dedicated domain which will show your own domain when prospects hover over the link.

This is essentially the same as a GMass assigned custom tracking domain, but it has the cosmetic benefits which can also increase your click-through rate.

Of course, if you don’t apply any tracking to your campaigns you won’t have to worry about this anyway. BUT, it’s recommended you track your campaigns to really know what’s working.

Exclude Past Prospects On-The-Fly With Suppress List

This is another reason I always like to use the suppress option in GMass, because it prevents me from pitching the same person with multiple campaigns.

You can apply this from the campaign settings:

Just CTRL + A (on a Windows) or Command + A (on a Mac) to select all past campaigns. Anyone you’ve reached out to before will be removed from the current campaign.

On a related note, GMass also automatically removes duplicates for any individual campaign – unless you tell it otherwise:

Skyrocket Response-Rate With Auto Follow-Ups

If there’s one thing GMass is known for, it’s how it handles follow-ups.

That’s right guys. Auto. Friggin. Follow-ups.

Without going all “sales-copy” on you, this is hands down one of the most powerful features of any outreach tool.

Not only does it save a huge amount of time, but it also gives you an instant conversion-boost if used it properly.

Here’s how it works:

Open the campaign settings to enable automatic follow-up emails to go out on a conditional basis.

Write out your emails and set specific intervals where follow-ups are sent for any prospect who doesn’t open your emails OR doesn’t reply back.

Finally, run the campaign and let GMass work it’s magic while you handle replies in your inbox.

Impressed yet?

And in case you’re wondering, you can’t do this with BuzzStream. Instead, you get follow-up reminders which is nowhere near as convenient.

On the other hand, this IS something you can do with MailShake.

Re-Use Your Best Performing Emails In Seconds

Templates are BIG business when it comes to outreach.

So much so that plenty of tools (and even online courses) use the inclusion of “plug n’ play” templates are one of their main selling points.

Currently, GMass doesn’t provide any outreach templates, but that’s not say they won’t be included at some stage.

GMass does have another useful, but related feature that deserves a mention. That’s the ability to pull in email content from previously sent campaigns.

And that’s almost like picking from a library of your own, self-created templates.

Providing you track your campaigns and see what actually performed well, I think this is a better alternative than having everyone use the same templates.

But hey, that’s just me. 🙂

Benefit From Frequent Updates

Something I really love about software products over physical products is how they have the potential to get better over time.

You wouldn’t buy a laptop and wake up one day to find your RAM just doubled, or that your display now supports 4K video. If anything, your laptop’s overall performance gets worse over time.

And one thing you quickly notice about GMass is how frequently updates are made to the software, with new features being added all the time.

Just scroll through the blog and you’ll see what I mean:

But it’s not just about adding new features for the sake of adding new features. They need to actually be useful.

And I have to give credit to the founder on this one. Ajay clearly works hard behind the scenes, focusing on changes and improvements his customers are actually crying out for.

GMass is still fairly new as far as software goes and with the current pace of development, I think this little piece of kit has a ton of potential.

Your Get Out Of Jail Free Card

I say this with every tool I review, and I’ll say it again.

Support is a KEY aspect of anything you buy into these days. When s*** hits the fan, you need to know there’s a lifeline. A get out of jail free card.

So how does GMass scrub up?

Well, they funnel all support requests through to their email-based ticketing system, Zendesk. There’s no phone number, live chat or any direct point of contact.

That said, the support staff are usually pretty good at responding within 1-2 days – with the founder, Ajay, jumping in from time to time.

In fact, he even checks over support requests to make sure they were properly taken care of:

And I have to say, while writing this review I asked a LOT of questions to make sure I had all the facts for you guys. Ajay and his staff were extremely patient and really took the time to explain certain technicalities to me.

So I need pay #respect to that.

The GMass blog also acts as a detailed knowledge base, answering a ton of common questions. So be sure to check that our first if you’re ever stuck.

Finally, there is a dedicated post on the blog for getting the best support from GMass as well as a post for the most common support issues. Both definitely worth a read before reaching out.

Is GMass Right For You?

So I’ve covered all the different features and functions of GMass, how they contribute when it actually comes to doing outreach and weighed up all the pros and cons along the way.

But now I’d like to talk about whether YOU should invest in this tool, or if there’s in fact a better alternative you should turn to.

Beginner Link Builders

If you’re just getting started with link building, GMass can be a great option.

I say “can be” because as I mentioned at the start of this review, GMass isn’t an all-in-one solution. You need feed it with the right stuff so it can go off and work it’s magic.

As a beginner, you might be tempted to use a CRM like BuzzStream to handle the prospecting and scraping of contact information. But as I’ve already explained, I don’t recommend going down that road.

This isn’t a BuzzStream thing, or even a GMass thing. It’s about understanding that some parts of the outreach process should be handled by a human if you want real results. That first step is crucial.

Once you’re at a stage where you know how to carry out the first step effectively, you’ll be in a good place to benefit from using a dedicated outreach tool. And GMass is no doubt an excellent option.

Now, with that said. It’s not necessarily the best option.

MailShake does pretty much everything GMass does, except it’s a whole lot more intuitive due to it’s clean, user-friendly interface.

It’s a tough call, but I’d personally have to crown MailShake the best outreach tool for beginners.

Budget Link Builders

If you’re looking to build links on a budget, the true cost of GMass can be a little deceiving.

When the tool first hit the market, it was actually 100% free for a year, up until August, 2016. That’s when they introduced paid plans.

Here’s what they look like:

But it’s important to note; these prices are only for free Gmail accounts. If you’re using a G Suite account (which I highly recommend), you’ll have to pay a little more.

And that’s also only for individuals.

If you run an agency or you have a VA up your sleeve, it does start to get a little pricy for team plans.

So you can see how things start to rack up.Let’s take a step back for a minute and compare the basic plan with some of the other outreach tools on the market today.

Here’s how it looks on the surface:

Outreach / CRM Tool	Lowest-Cost Plan	Additional Users
GMass	$6.95 /month	5 users = $89 /month
BuzzStream	$24 /month	3 users = $99 /month
MailShake	$9 /month	Per user = $9 /month
Ninja Outreach	$49 /month	2 users = $99 /month
Reply App	$20 /month	Per user = $20 /month
Pitchbox	$195 /month	5 users = $295/ month

Based on that comparison alone, GMass clearly has lowest-cost plan for a single user with MailShake winning on multi-user plans.

But there’s more to the story. We’re not factoring in some of the limitations that come with these lower-cost plans – and at this price, GMass has some serious limitations to consider.

First of all, the GMass plan we compared includes it’s own footer on all emails, so all your prospects will be able to see you’re using an automated tool. That alone will send your response-rate plummeting.

Secondly, you don’t get the auto-follow up feature which is one the biggest reasons to use GMass is in the first place.

And finally, that plan doesn’t work with a G Suite account. As I’ve said mentioned on multiple occasions, you really should be using a paid account for this stuff.

Based on those reasons, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot by not going for the highest plan. And when you throw that substitution into the mix, it paints a whole different picture.

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Outreach / CRM Tool	Lowest-Cost Plan	Additional Users
GMass	$6.95 /month	5 users = $89 /month
BuzzStream	$24 /month	3 users = $99 /month
MailShake	$9 /month	Per user = $9 /month
Ninja Outreach	$49 /month	2 users = $99 /month
Reply App	$20 /month	Per user = $20 /month
Pitchbox	$195 /month	5 users = $295/ month

Now MailShake wins on both counts, and most importantly, it doesn’t suffer the same limitations as the GMass low-cost plan we compared earlier.

But we’re not done yet, because there’s still one thing GMass has that MailShake doesn’t.

*drum roll please*

…a free plan.

In fact, GMass has a free plan that rivals even some it’s own paid plans. I know, it sounds crazy but hear me out.

With the free plan, you can send up to 50 emails per day and you get all the other benefits of being on the individual premium plan.

That means NO forced footer on your emails, and it means auto follow-ups ARE enabled (but do count towards the daily allowance).

So if you’re on a really tight budget, the GMass free plan is the way to go.

High-Level Link Builders

Any link builder worth his domain authority knows that having the right tools in their toolkit is key to scaling link-acquisition.

GMass is hands down one of those tools.

This pocket-sized chrome extension is the jet-engine that powers your Gmail account, allowing you to send thousands of personalized emails at the click of a button.

Most importantly, it’s only limited by the ceiling set in place by Google’s mailing servers. VERY few outreach tools give you that level of untethered power.

But is it better BuzzStream?

It depends on your outreach strategy. If every prospect counts and you’re set on the sniper approach, then you’ll benefit from management aspect of the tool – though it does require continuous maintenance.

You can still manage your prospects alongside GMass, it just takes a bit of DIY and some spreadsheet wizardry. But if having that built-in management functionality is a crucial factor for you, then you won’t go far wrong with BuzzStream.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to scale your outreach and you’re set on the shotgun approach, then you’ll love the raw sending power of GMass.

Even though there’s a lot more under the hood with BuzzStream, most of the additional features you get are second-class in comparison to dedicated tools.

How does it stack up against MailShake?

Honestly, it’s a very close call. Personally, I just about prefer MailShake over GMass but they’re both very similar in what they can do. MailShake having a real user-interface just appeals to me more.

That said, there’s one thing with MailShake you need to be aware of, however.

You can’t request a custom tracking domain. Which means, according to GMass, your sending reputation will be dictated by other users, including spammers. Ultimately lowering your deliverability.

How significant is that for you?

Truth is, it’s very difficult to say – especially given the experts can’t even agree on how important it is.

This is a response I got from MailShake:

I’ve never heard about domain tracking links affecting deliverability, and neither has our dev team. If you perform responsible email outreach and avoid spam-like behavior, you shouldn’t have any issues with deliverability. We haven’t had any customers with deliverability issues using the tool.

Make of that what you will but if you are concerned by the whole “custom tracking domain” argument, stick with GMass.

Otherwise, you’ll have everything you need to run campaigns at scale with either of these tools, so just take your pick.

How To Run a Guest Post Campaign With GMass

Now I couldn’t finish this review without showing you an actual use-case with GMass, could I?

Let’s run through the steps involved when it comes to running an link building outreach campaign with this tool. And there’s few better strategies to start with than guest posting.

As I touched on earlier in this review, the first phase is always about finding prospects and collecting all the right contact information.

That’s where the grind is.

For this tutorial, I’ll be skipping the classic “write for us” prospecting queries because they tend to bring back low-quality and overly-pitched opportunities.

• Instead, I’m gonna to swipe some of Perrin’s advanced queries (sorry bro).
• [Keyword] “guest post by”
• [Keyword] “guest post written by”
• [Keyword] “guest author today”
• [Keyword] “this is a guest post by”
• [Keyword] “guest article”
• [Keyword] “the following guest post”

This is very different to the traditional approach because we’re not looking for blogs that openly accept guest posts.

We’re actually looking for blogs that have previously accepted a guest post. And we can do that by leveraging common footprints associated with posts that have been contributed by a third-party.

These blogs may be harder to get onto, but they’re generally much higher quality.

So let me show you it in action. For this example, I’ll plug the first query into Google with the keyword “baking”.

From here you can look at each of these sites meta title and description to gauge if it’s actually a guest post (or in this case, an archive of guest posts).

The top one looks promising:

Immediately, I can see this is a great opportunity.

• They’ve already published guest posts (they understand the value of a high-quality contribution
• The site looks very clean and credible
• It has a domain authority of 62 – which is pretty damn strong

All I need to do now is find the contact information.

There’s a number of ways to find contact information, but Hunter (or Email Hunter) is a fairly reliable tool for this.

And it did hook me up this time.

Since I already know her name from the email address, I can start adding this prospect to my spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet itself doesn’t need to be anything fancy.

As you can see above, I’ve got 3 extra columns.

These “topic ideas” are essentially the focus of my pitch and since they’ll be different for each prospect, we can save a ton of time by letting GMass handle it with mail merge.

So how do you find topic ideas your prospect will love?

You look at what their audience loves.

Simply plug your prospects domain into a tool like Ahrefs Content Explorer or BuzzSumo, and you can sort the sites content based on performance factors like links or social shares.

These topics are already PROVEN to work, and this is exactly the kind of data-focused research that lands you guest posts on authoritative sites. So don’t skip it, alright?

All I need to do is come up with 3 ideas based on my findings, and I’m good to go.

Obviously if I was doing this properly I’d get dozens of prospects lined up here before I ran a campaign, but I think you get the picture.

Now it’s time for the second phase.

Let’s bring on the star of the show, GMass.

All you need to do now is click the button to connect the Google sheet and let GMass “read it”.

Once it’s all synced up, you’ll see your prospects emails in the compose window and you can start writing your pitch.

Don’t forget to include those text replacements 🙂

Next, open the campaign settings and set up your auto follow-up emails.

Like I said before, 2 follow-ups are plenty.

And finally, hit the red “GMass” button to send your campaign using mail merge.

Just sit back, relax and wait for the responses to come in. When things do start happening, you can handle all replies as usual right inside your Gmail inbox.

That’s all there is to it.

Conclusion

Unlike some of the tools I review here on Authority Hacker, GMass is one I’m very familiar with because I’d already been using for my own link building campaigns for several months.

I can confidently say it’s one of the most powerful and most affordable outreach tools out there right now. And it’s perfect for sending emails at scale regardless of what level you’re at or how experienced you are.

And when you realize that outreach is ultimately just a numbers, you start to see why GMass is so damn effective at securing links. It’s just about combining GMass with targeted, manual prospecting alongside a well-planned outreach strategy.

If you can do that successfully, you’re pretty much guaranteed to land 100% home-grown, white-hat links from every campaign you run.