How To Create Mail Merge in Gmail
Mail merge is an add-on which makes you effort less when you are sending emails to different recipients with different customized emails in one shot. You can write a draft email in Gmail, and specify the number of recipients in a google spread sheet. Then Mail merge program send this customized emails to all recipients in one shot.
By using this add-on, we have several features to send personalized emails. The email can be written in plain text or rich-text HTML and you’ll know if an email can be read or not by tracking the email opens, from google drive you can insert different file attachments for each recipient. It having another feature that you can also schedule merge and send your emails later at your preferred date and time.
Mail merge is a famous feature on Microsoft outlook, and we can easily perform mail merge in Gmail and google apps accounts with the use of google scripts.
How to do mail merge in Gmail
The first step is install the mail merge add-on, if you have own google account you can add it or if you are a google app admin just install the mail merge to all users in your domain.
- Install mail merge in your google account
- Install mail merge in your google app domain
Follow these steps after the add-on is installed
- Go to google spreadsheet, then hit on add-ons menu then you’ll see an option mail merge with attachments.
- Then click on create merge template to add blank mail merge template to your google spreadsheet.it contains main columns like first name, email address etc. you can add more columns also if you required.
- You can write the details of the recipients like first name, email address and other details in the mail merge sheet. Click on import google contacts to fetch any existing contacts groups from google contacts on mail merge.it saves your time.
- If you like to add attachments to any recipients, clone them in file attachments column, login to your google drive and right click on particular file and select menu get link or copy URL. Now you can paste URL of particular file in the google sheet. You should remember to put comma between different file URL.
- There is another option i.e., schedule mail merge. If you would like to do this go to scheduled date column and put the date and time when you would like to send that mail. For this use dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm format.
How to create mail merge template
First you can create a draft message in your Gmail account. And include one or more variable fields in email message like {{first name}}, {{area}}. By using this notations, you can create a draft message but the real values are applied from the sheet when the email send.
Go in detail if you look to send an email to a group. Basically the method body is mostly same. But there is difference at salutation and first name, city like that. In that you can include variable fields and also check these variables in Gmail draft.
By completing this all tasks then we can go to mail merge sheet and click on mail merge to start sending emails and also choose the Gmail draft that you created before then hit on run button. The add-on will automatically send the emails to addresses if the schedule date column is blank, or else it will send the emails based on the time and date in the schedule date column which is inserted by you.
You should check your merge frequently before sending email to a large group if you feel easier with mail merge in Gmail. Insert your own email on email address column in a single data row in the spreadsheet. Run Merge as before and see your Gmail Sent Items folder to make sure that your outgoing emails are as expected.
This is all about mail merge in Gmail. If you have any queries, please mention in the below comment section.
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