How to Send Bulk Emails in Zendesk: Native Options & Apps

Zendesk Support can’t send a mass email campaign. Its own help center says there is no native way to send newsletters or marketing blasts from Support, so you install an app from the Marketplace. Below: what Zendesk does give you, which apps fill the gap, and which one fits which job.

What Zendesk does natively

Three built-in tools come close. None of them is a campaign tool, however there’s one way to send emails to 100 users at a time.

Bulk Edit Existing Tickets (Support View)

Just create a specific View or use the existing one, select needed tickets or the whole view and cleck Edit on the bottom of the page.

Then, you can add internal note or public reply and send them in bulk. The feature is qiute straighforward and fits only if you have small amount of users, never use CSV import, email templates and other options offered by third-party apps.

Take into account, that you can’t send bulk notifications to tickets with closed status, work with custom field or follow-ups contrary to apps that can do this.

Other native Zendesk workarounds

The data importer (Admin Center → Objects and rules → Tools) loads or updates users and organizations from a CSV. It’s admin-only and covers Support users and roles only. It sends nothing on purpose, but new users may get a welcome email. Check the setting under People → Configuration → End users before you import, or every new user receives a verification email.

Triggers and automations send an email when a ticket event or a time condition fires. They work one ticket at a time and can’t be pointed at a list or a segment.

Zendesk Sell can send one message to selected leads or contacts, and recipients can’t see each other. It’s a separate product built for leads, and each user is capped at 300 emails per rolling 24 hours.

Third-party apps compared

Four Marketplace options cover most needs. Here we’ll compare four marketplace leaders and describe their advantages and disatvantages.

How to send a bulk email with Proactive Campaigns

Other apps work along similar lines; the screens differ.

1. Open Admin → Apps → Marketplace, find Proactive Campaigns and install it.

2. Under Admin → Apps → Manage, make sure it’s enabled, then open it and authorize access.

3. Build the audience. Filter Zendesk users, tickets or organizations (say, role is end user and created after a given date).

Or upload a CSV of outside contacts.

4. Write the message from a template: drag-and-drop, rich text or HTML. Save it if you’ll reuse it.

5. Send a test to yourself and a colleague.

6. Launch, then read the statistics. Add a follow-up or an A/B test if needed.

If you only want tickets created when customers reply, send from the support address with a clear reply-to. Then the replies become tickets, and the outbound mail doesn’t.

Which option to choose

• Customer service messaging (outage notices, order updates, follow-ups after resolved tickets): Proactive Campaigns or Proactive Bulk Tickets, since the data stays in Zendesk.
• Real email marketing (newsletters, advanced segmentation, long-term list management): Proactive Campaigns or Mailchimp with Zendesk kept for support.
• A few dozen one-off emails: a small tool such as Batch Email Sender, or your own mailbox with a reply-to address.

Whichever you pick, get recipient consent where the law requires it (for example GDPR), include an unsubscribe link in marketing mail, and set up SPF and DKIM for your sending domain so messages do not land in spam. Check current pricing and plan limits on each app’s Marketplace page before committing.