Google: Send Personalized Emails with Mail Merge

Introduction: Gmail's Mail Merge feature allows you to send personalized emails to multiple recipients. This article will guide you through the process of using mail merge to send customized emails efficiently.

Table of Contents:

1. Enabling Mail Merge
2. Adding Recipients from a Spreadsheet
3. Inserting Merge Tags
4. Special Characters Considerations
5. Previewing and Sending

Enabling Mail Merge

1. Open Gmail on your computer.
2. Click "Compose" at the top left to start a new mail, or click "Drafts" to open an existing draft.

3. In the pop-out window, click on the Recipients line (where the "To" is), then click the "Use mail merge" icon on the right of "Bcc".

4. Check the box for Mail Merge.

Adding Recipients from a Spreadsheet

1. Click "Add from a spreadsheet."

2. Select the spreadsheet with your desired recipients and click "Insert."

Note: If you get an error message when you are linking the spreadsheet, make sure you check for the following:

• It cannot have empty column headers, which means the first row of each column needs to be filled.
• It cannot have duplicate column headers, so check the first row to see if any of the headers have the same name.
• It must contain a column for emails, and they should be formatted correctly.
• It cannot have duplicate emails.
• It is recommended that you have at least one column for recipients' names, or two columns for first and last names, since mail merge tends to include the names of the recipients in the email.

Here is a good example of a spreadsheet that mail merge will accept:

3. Use the drop-down menus to choose columns with corresponding recipient information. Only Email and First Name are required, but you can select the Last Name column as well if applicable. Click "Finish" when you are done.

4. You will see that the spreadsheet is added as a recipient.

Inserting Merge Tags

1. In your message, enter "@" to trigger the merge tag pop-up. This is used when you want to use the information from a specific column of the spreadsheet.

2. Select a merge tag (based on your spreadsheet column headers) by clicking on it. The tags you selected would be embedded in your message.

Special Characters Considerations

• Merge tags are based on column headers in your spreadsheet.
• If a column name has special characters other than A-Z or numbers, the corresponding merge tag will use its position (e.g., "@A" for the first column).

• Invalid characters in email addresses should be avoided.

Previewing and Sending

1. Once you are done drafting your message with appropriate tags, click "Continue" at the bottom.

2. If your recipients are from other organizations, there is a chance that your email will be marked as spam by them. If your message contains important information, you may want to confirm with your recipients that they have received it. Click "Got it" to proceed.

3. You can just click "Send all" to finalize the sending, or you can select "Send preview" to send one to yourself first if you want to double check that the tags are displaying the correct information.

4. After clicking "Send all", it will take a while for the emails to be delivered. Here is an example of what your recipients will see.

Conclusion: Gmail's mail merge feature simplifies sending personalized emails. By following these concise steps, you can efficiently create and send customized messages to multiple recipients.

If you need further assistance, please reach out to IT by emailing: helpdesk@saga.org.