Gmail mail merge tutorial - Send bulk email from Gmail [2020]

sometimes you might need to send the same email to a bunch of people and the gmail mail merge solution you're about to learn is a great way to do that i'm going to step you through two different ways to do it step by step it's really simple process so stick around i'm jimmy from jimmyrose.me and content snare and if you'd like to learn more ways about how to automate your business and get more productive and just random tech tips like this one please hit that subscribe button below now if you're watching this and you plan on spamming people you suck but there are plenty of perfectly legitimate times when this can apply so in my business i've used this when i'm working with several partners and i need to keep them informed about something and i don't want to just add them to my email list because if i'm sending an email from say activecampaign or crm there's going to be an unsubscribe and a bunch of stuff at the bottom that clearly makes it look like i've gone and put them on an email list which i don't want that look i've also used this in my personal life to send out wedding invitations because who still uses paper and cardboard one thing to note is that if you do overdo this your emails are going to end up in spam like you can't use this to go and send like a mailing list to thousands of people it's just not going to work you're going to get your email blacklisted doing that there's no hard rule for when your emails are going to end up in spam it depends on the kind of emails you're sending how many you're sending your previous reputation like what kind of stuff is in the email like what kind of words so just be careful with this and use this sensibly so the two processes you're going to learn the first one is yet another mail merge which is a paid tool but there is a free tier that will do up to 50 emails a day it's a little bit simpler to get started with so we'll we'll go there first the second one is using a google apps script that you can install in like a couple of clicks it's still really simple don't worry i'm going to step you through it so let's get into it so first have a look at the gmail sending limits so gmail actually does limit how many emails you can send a day through different kinds of accounts whether it's just like a free gmail or like a g suite i'm not going to go through this in detail just because it does change it literally says here sending limits can change without notice but i'll leave the link in the description to this article i mean if you're not going crazy with this you're probably going to be fine because you can see the numbers are relatively big there uh okay so first thing to do is to jump over to this site here yet another mailmerge.com with dashes in it you can just of course google yet another mail merge and that will bring you here so first you have to install the tool to your gmail account so you can just click this button it'll take you over to the chrome web store now i have already installed it but if you haven't you'll get the install button there just follow the prompts once you've done that all you're going to do is create a new spreadsheet in your google drive i actually use the same sheet every time so i don't have to go through and create a new one and i just call it mail merge so when i do a search in my google drive it shows up and i'm ready to go and i've got some sample data here so go ahead and create your own sheet and you can just give it a couple of simple headings for now i'm going with email address and name you might want to call this first name and if you want to have a last name every one of these columns are things that we can use in the email body right so if i had another one here like you wanted to send everyone a coupon code or something if you wanted to fill that out in the email i'll show you how to do that now the next step is to go over to gmail and create a draft so i've just got a new email up here i'm literally just going to click new in your account now to get a pop-up for this and we're just going to create the email so let's say it's going to be hi name so remember we had name as the main thing you need to make sure this is exactly the same and to add this to the email you do two curly brackets then you put in the column header oops so i've pasted in some spaces there so i'm just going to make sure i paste that in without any formatting and then you want to do two close brackets let's keep this really simple and just say your coupon is i'm pretty sure it was coupon with a capital c yep i'm gonna go cheers james and i'm gonna leave my default signature there um give it a subject is your coupon code and you can actually set this email up however you like you could put attachments on it you could put a bcc address i'm actually not going to do that just because i don't want to bcc that person all the time but yeah you can set this email up pretty much however you like and this tool is going to duplicate this email every time and send it to all your recipients if you're using email aliases like i am and you can actually change the from address you can set that here as well so once you've got that draft that's already saved at this point jump back over to your spreadsheet go to tools go to add-ons yet another mail merge and start mail merge you'll get this thing here that says that it needs your permission to run the script so go ahead click continue and click your account to give this script permission to run on your account it's going to bring up a box every time you load it it'll try to upsell you to an account but from the free account you can send 50 per day so go ahead and continue you've got the name there so you're probably going to leave this as your own name most likely and then just click this and this shows all the drafts in your account you can see there's the one we just created here's your coupon code if you go away and create another draft you just hit this reload button to to bring in the new ones and then you would hit this button now just to go and send those four emails but first i would always recommend doing a test so hit that button you can see there check your inbox to view the email it's going to jump over to my gmail account and there it is there so you can see that the name worked and that the coupon code replacement work that's what you want to check here make sure there's no curly brackets still in the email because then it means you've done something wrong and at that point all you've got to do is go and hit sends now these emails are all just going to come to me because i've used the plus syntax in gmail which it actually ignores everything after the plus so these are all going to come to my standard email and you can see there it's ran that mail merge and it's created a new column here just to say that the email has been sent if you click on it it gives you the exact time that it was sent so if we jump over to my email now we should see four of those come in so you can see our four emails bob sally jimmy sarah have come in and that's it um so if you're sending under 50 emails a day go ahead and try uh yet another mail merge there's a another method though uh that basically isn't going to be subjected to these limits and it's also not an external tool it's just a script that runs in your account so if you have i guess any concerns with giving another company permission to access your gmail like that this next method does not have that as a requirement so for the second method go over to this url here i will drop this in the description below but this is basically just a script that is provided on the google developers g suite solutions area contributed by martin hawksey it's slightly more complicated but honestly it's still very easy so you're gonna first go down here and click this link here to create a copy of the sample sheet that they give you and it's going to take you directly to this link to copy the documents go ahead and make a copy and it's going to drop that directly into your google drive account if you wanted to move the folder you can just click that there and specify where you want to store it but i'm just going to leave it here for now now you can see here it's given us some sample data pretty similar to the last one it's a bit more complicated they've just added a few different things there but it works in the exact same way when you're creating a draft with this one you can't use the bcc addresses and the aliases don't work as well so pretty much all you're going to be able to do is the subject and the body of the email similar to this but this time we've got slightly different things right we want first name so make sure it says exactly first name in here and make sure it says discount code here and if you're going to add the other different things like i think there was description i'll just use that one as an example i'm not going to go through and create all of them i'm sure you can see how that's going to work notice one slight difference here in yet another mail merge we had email address as a column and that's what it expected and in mail merge they've called it recipient i believe it gives us the option to choose the column so it's not a big deal but i mean you may as well just leave it as as it is after you copy it so at this point you can go ahead and use mail merge send email but it's not ideal because it doesn't actually set the name you're sending from so my personal email address here would actually show up as the name rather than just my name james rose so we're going to do a couple of quick edits first and we're going to go into a script editor here don't freak out it's uh it's actually pretty easy so we're gonna go to tools script editor and it's going to open the script which is running this entire mail merge so just scroll down and you'll see this section here where it does the gmail app dot send email this is the part we're going to edit so all we're going to do is uncomment this so delete those two slashes and change your name and if you want to set any of these other things you can do that here too so if you wanted a bcc address like i said it doesn't work in the draft for this one so instead just delete that one and change your bcc there or if you have multiple email aliases like i do instead of changing them in the draft you would change the email address you want to send this from now if you're doing this make sure you actually have this set up as an alias in gmail and you'll know that if it shows up in that drop down there if it's not set up it's going to try and force a random email address that you're typing in and that's almost definitely going to end up in spam so make sure that's an alias i'm going to leave that for now because i'll just send it from my personal address but i do want to make sure that name is done and you can see here that it will be sending attachments from the draft as well so attachments do work with this option as well anyway once we're done with that just gonna hit that save button and jump back to the sheet click mail merge and send emails again it's going to ask for permission so bring that up now this one says the app isn't verified with google so it's going to be this extra step you have to hit advanced and then go to gmail mail merge it says it's unsafe but it's just giving permission to run a script that google hasn't explicitly verified and that verification process is really big now so i guess if this isn't comfortable for you uh you know go ahead and use yet another mail merge but um i'm fine with this so i'm gonna go down and click allow once that's done you actually have to run the script again after you do the permission thing so do it again and see here it actually asks for the subject of the draft so it doesn't give you that drop down like the other one but that's okay we'll just go back here and select here's your coupon code maybe i'll call it number two because so we can see which ones are coming from which tool just gonna click out of that make sure it's saved oh actually just before we do this i should go ahead and change these email addresses to something and go ahead and run that script again i'm going to paste that in and hit ok you'll see it says running script at the top there and once it's finished it fills out that column there to say the date the email was sent so if we jump over to my email again here we can see the two new emails so it's set the name to me and it's gone ahead and gone bob and the coupon code and the description column from uh from there now what i didn't cover here is testing again this is definitely something you want to test as well to do that literally just do it with one line i just delete that put your own email address or another email that you have access to in here run that mail merge on your own email first just to make sure all those placeholders work and then come in and dump your full list so you could always you know create another sheet here with all your emails ready to go and then just copy them over afterwards once you've run that test okay that's it that's how you send bulk email using gmail's different mail merge options these are two of the simplest methods there are so i hope that was fairly easy to follow and you're able to solve that problem now again if you'd like to learn more about automating your business becoming more productive or just learning cool new tech ideas hit that subscribe button below i'm jimmy from jimmyrose.me and contentsnare and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: JimmyRose - Automation & Productivity

Views: 42,645

Rating: 4.8297873 out of 5

Keywords: gmail mail merge, gmail mail merge google sheets, gmail mail merge with attachments, gmail mail merge tutorial, gmail mail merge from sheets, gmail mail merge limit, gmail mail merge script, gmail mail merge extension, gmail mail merge without add on, gmail mail merge free, send bulk email from gmail, send bulk emails for free, send bulk email from google sheets, mail merge, sending bulk email in gmail, yet another mail merge, mass email in gmail

Id: xmjLesigTSo

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020