Merge Mail & Mass Mailing

Data processing programs provide a feature called mail merge that allows users to send a similar letter or document to numerous recipients. It allows you to connect a single form template to a data source that provides information such as the recipient’s name, address, and other predefined and supporting information.

Mass email, also known as bulk email, refers to the sending of promotional email campaigns to a large list of contacts (customers, subscribers, prospects, etc.) to achieve a specific goal, such as to promote a product or relay critical information.

Merge Mail in Gmail

To get started, please download Mail Merge for Gmail. You can download the add-on on your Google Account, or if you are a Google Workspace admin, you can install it for all users in your Google Workspace domain.

After the add-on has been installed, please follow the following steps:

1. Head to the Google Spreadsheet, click the Add- ons menu and you will see a new menu named Mail merge with Attachments.
2. Click the Create Merge Template menu to clone the blank mail merge template in your Google Spreadsheet. It contains columns like First Name, Email Address, etc. but you may add more.
3. Head to the Import Google Contacts menu to bring any existing Google Contacts contact groups into Mail Merge. This saves time, but you can also manually enter the recipients' first names, email addresses, and other information in the Mail Merge sheet.
4. In the File Attachments column, you can assign unique attachments for each of your recipients. Go to Google Drive, right-click a file, and choose Get Link to copy the file's URL, which you can then paste into the sheet. You can also include multiple files, but remember to use commas to separate the URLs.
5. When you run a mail merge, it will send all the messages immediately. You can, however, schedule emails to be sent later, and the program will do so automatically. To schedule an email, go to the Scheduled Date column and type in the date and time you want the email to be sent.

Now that the spreadsheet is all set up, we can create a draft message:

1. Head to your Gmail account and create a new draft message. You can include one or more variable fields in the email message using the {{field name}} notation and these will be replaced with the actual values from the sheet when the emails are sent.
   
   For instance, if you want to send an email to a group where the content of the message body is mostly similar except for a few fields like first name and city, which will be unique for each message, you need to add columns in the sheet for each of these variable fields. And in your Gmail Draft, you can refer to these variable fields as {{First Name}}, {{City}}, etc. You may also include file attachments in the message and they will be sent with every email.
2. Now that the template is ready, head to the Mail Merge sheet and choose Run Mail Merge, to start sending emails. Choose the Gmail draft that you created in the previous step and hit the Run button. The add-on will instantly send emails to addresses where the Scheduled Date column is blank while others would be put in the queue and will be sent automatically at the set date and time.

Merge Mail in Microsoft Outlook

Before you begin, open a blank document in Word and type the body of the email message you want to send. Then you can start the Mail Merge.

1. Head to Mailings > Start Mail Merge > E-mail Messages.
2. Now you have to import a mailing list, but if you do not have one, you can create one during mail merge.
   If you happen to be using an Excel spreadsheet, format the ZIP Codes or Postal Codes column as text to preserve any zeros. If you would like to use your Outlook Contacts, make sure that Outlook is your default email program and the same version as Word.
3. Now you have to link your mailing list to your email message. Head to Mailings > Select Recipients. Then choose a data source, click File > Save.
4. Add personalized content to the email message by heading to Mailings > Greeting Line. Select the format that you would like to use, click OK to insert the merge field, click File > Save.
5. Select Preview Results, then select Next or Previous, in order to see the names and addresses in the body of your letter.
   
   • Select Finish & Merge > Send E-mail Messages.
   • In the To box, choose the email address column or field from your mailing list.
   • In the Subject line box, type a subject line for the message.
   • In the Mail format box, select HTML (the default setting) or Plain text to send the document as the body of the email message.
   • Then, under Send records, select one of the following: All records, Currently record, From and To.
   • Then click OK to run mail merge.
   • Then head to File > Save.

Mass Emails in eM Client

eM Client has simplified the way to send bulk emails. All you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Create a new message and enter all the email addresses that you would like to send the email to in the To field.
2. Type in your email’s subject in the subject line.
3. Type out the email you wish to send.
4. When the email is ready to be sent, all you have to do is click on the arrow next to Send, which pulls down a dropdown menu, and select Send as mass mail.

This allows you to send the emails to all the recipients, without them knowing who else received them and with each copy of the emails being sent only to them.

You can also use this feature with a distribution list. For instance, you have to send an email to a specific group of people. Instead of manually entering the emails, you can simply create a distribution list.

To create a distribution list:

1. Click on the arrow next to New, in the top right corner, and select Distribution list.
2. Name the distribution list and add members to the list.

When you start a new email, all you have to do is put in the name of the Distribution List in the To field. Write your email, and then send it as mass email. All the recipients remain hidden.

You can also use variables in your messages.

To add variables:

1. Right-click the message body while composing a new message.
2. Select Insert > Variable.
3. Select from the pre-defined general or contact-specific variables.

Note: If you would like to insert specific contact data, the contact must be saved in the eM Client app and the required fields must be filled out.