How to Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Sheets

my name is a meta grewal I'm a Google developer expert for D suite and this is a tutorial on how you can use mail merge for Gmail John is a public relations professional and he is often required to send press releases and even invites to journalists bloggers and influencers via email now how do you send the same email to multiple people in one go some people prefer the BCC option in Gmail so he compose a single email put email addresses of all the recipients in the BCC box and hit Send that's obviously the easiest option for sending bulk emails but such a generic message will always have a very low response rate in this tutorial I'll show you how you can use mail merge for Gmail to send personalized email pictures to your media contacts through Google sheets you will also be able to schedule your press releases in advance and you can also track which influencers have seen your emails so let's get started go to the G suite marketplace and install the mail merge for Gmail add-on I'll put a link to this add-on in the video description as well the first time you install this add-on you'll need to grant certain permissions so that this add-on can send emails from your Gmail to your Google contacts it also needs permissions to attach files from your Google Drive in your email messages [Music] once the add-on is installed type sheets dot new in your browser to create a new Google sheet and this is where we run our made much from now inside the Google sheet the first time you run a mail merge so just enable the add-on then go back to the add-ons menu and choose mail merge with attachments and then select create merge template your sheet now has all the essential columns that are required for any mail merge but you are free to add more columns for this example let me add two extra columns now to get the contacts into this Google sheet you have a couple of options you can go to the mail merge menu and import your contacts from Google contacts or if you are a male chimp user you can import your existing MailChimp subscribers into the Google sheet or if you are an Excel user you can export that data as a CSV file and that import it into this Google sheet for this example we will quickly write the data into the Google sheet manually [Music] [Music] [Music] okay now that our data is ready I'll go back to my gmail account and create an email template so our email template has mostly static text but if we enclose something inside double curly braces it becomes a variable marker or a placeholder and this placeholder would be replaced with the actual values from the Google sheet to give you an example here I've put news outlet inside double curly braces and when the emails go out this marker would be replaced with the values from Google sheet [Music] the email body is complete now let me type the subject line here again I can use markers for a more personalized subject maybe I can also add an emoji here [Music] next we can add some attachments in our email template now you can either upload files from your computer but since I already have the files in my Google Drive I will add them to my gmail directly from Google Drive now remember that when you are adding files from Google Drive we should attach them as attachments and not links okay now that our email template is ready I'll go back to the Google sheet and configure mail merge [Music] if your Google spreadsheet has multiple sheets this is very choose the correct sheet that has your data next we specify the sender's email now in mail merge you can send emails on behalf of any email address that is associated as an alias in your Gmail account next specify the sender's name now this would show up when somebody opens your email now if you would like to be cc or CC anyone in your emails you can put their email addresses here uh please note that Gmail counts every cc or BCC recipient as a separate email and as it counts towards your daily email quota next we expand the tracking section and let me provide a name for this email campaign now this is only used internally for reporting purpose and not visible to your email recipients so I want to track who opened my emails I there are no link so I will uncheck the track links option also this is just a one-time email so I don't want to add an unsubscribe link in my email messages so this section is done we move to the next one where we need to specify our email template now you have a couple of options here you can either use a visual editor to compose the emails right inside your Google sheet just like the way we have done it inside Gmail if you have an email design ready say you have exported from MailChimp or other email designing software you can export that design as an HTML file and use the code your own HTML option to import that HTML design into your mail merge and finally you can use any gmail draft as a template we'll go with this one because our draft is already in Gmail [Music] okay so we are all set now our first let me send a test email to see how the final email would look like the test email has been sent I'll switch to Gmail and there you can find a copy in the sent items folder now this email is exactly like a gmail draft except that the place markers and the the variables that are inside double curly braces they have been replaced with the values that are in the first row of the Google sheet [Music] so this looks good let me go back to the Google sheet and run mail merge on the actual data in the Google sheet [Music] [Music] the emails have been sent and if I go back to my Gmail you can find all the personalized emails in the sent folder [Music] now if I have to add more recipients to my email campaign all I have to do is add the data into the Google sheet now when I run mail merge again you'll notice that mail merge will only send emails to the new recipients and it will skip each sending emails to the ones that have already been sent how did it know that so there's a mail merge status in our Google sheet and when that status is mail sent that row is automatically skipped so your recipients won't receive an email again even if you have run the mail merge again on the same Google sheet now I will show you a couple of more features in mail merge that you will find useful you can schedule mails in mail merge so all you have to do is add a date and time to the scheduled date column in mail merge [Music] [Music] [Music] now you may have noticed that nothing happened when I ran mail merge and that's because mail Mart has already processed those rolls so if I have to reprocess a row I'll have to first clear the mail merge status column manually the emails have been scheduled but for some reason if you wish to cancel your scheduled emails you have two options you can either empty the scheduled date column or you can go to the mail merge help menu and then choose the cancel scheduled mail option if you have lot of rows in your Google sheet you can skip sending emails to specific rows by hiding them alternatively you can use filters in Google sheets to only show rows that meet a specific criteria now when you run mail merge again emails will be sent only two rows that are visible [Music] with me admires you can also send different attachments to different people very easily now if I go back to the original gmail draft you can see that we have a couple of attachments there and all email recipients will receive every attachment that's included in the steamer Draft however if you wish to send specific attachments to specific people you can do that as well so go back to the Google sheet and highlight the cell under the file attachments column now from the mail merge menu you can add files that you wish to send to specific people in that room now you can either insert files that are in your computer or you can pull them directly from your Google Drive [Music] now when you insert an attachment mail-merge will initially insert the file links in the file attachments column but when the actual emails go out these links will be replaced with the actual files in your emails you can also create drafts in mail merge and this is a very handy option if you wish to review the emails manually before sending them to real people [Music] and finally if you wish to check who has opened your emails is good to the mail merge menu and choose campaign reports you can even get a report of emails that have bounced so that was a quick overview of mail merge for Gmail I would also invite you to try a document studio this is similar to mail merge but for creating beautiful pixel-perfect documents you can find a link in the show notes thanks

Channel: Amit Agarwal

Views: 97,879

Rating: 4.9337931 out of 5

Keywords: labnol

Id: ChGBcFtYdVA

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020