We’ve all done mailmerge the old school way using Word and excel, but have you ever done it using an email application before?

Quite regularly I have to send out mass emails to journalists (amongst others) for clients and let’s face it, having an email ‘dear editor’ is a sure way of getting them to ignore your email amongst the other hundreds they must have each day, so I’ve always personalised my emails to gain maximum responses and to make it look more professional, and how I do that is by mail merge using Gmail, and I want to share with you how I do it.. It’s VERY simple!

So first you need to create an email template in Gmail so you can save for later, this is called a ‘canned response’.

1 – Creating a canned response in Gmail

Login to your Gmail account.

Click “Settings” on the top right of the Gmail page, then click the “Labs” link near the top of the page.

Scroll down to “Canned Responses.” Select “Enable” to activate the plug-in, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “Save changes” button. Wait for Gmail to reload.

Click the “Compose Mail” button on the left of the Gmail screen. A new “Canned Responses” link will appear at the top of your email.

Click the “Canned Responses” link, then click “New canned response.” Create a name for your Gmail template and type it into the dialog box that appears, then click “OK.” Type the text for your Gmail template, with any formatting you with to use, into the email window.

Click the “Canned responses” link again, then click the name of your template underneath the bold “Save” text. Confirm that you wish to overwrite the existing template by clicking “OK.” Your template is now ready for use. Click “Discard” at the top of the screen to return to the main Gmail screen.

Now you’re ready to prepare for the Mail merge

2 – Creating Mail merge using Gmail….

In the template email you’ve created in the above steps, replace the terms that you want to personalise with. For example, if you want to personalise the name of the email, replace the name with “$%Name%” or “$%first_name%“ (this must correspond with the field in the spreadsheet you’re about to create)

Next, open Google Drive (used to be Google docs) and create a new spreadsheet. In the first row of the spreadsheet, insert the terms that you use in the Gmail template. At the last cell, insert another field call “Email Address”. Then populate your spreadsheet with the details of who you’re sending it to.

The next thing we are going to do is to add a Google script that will merge the content from the spreadsheet to Gmail and send the email out.

On the Spreadsheet, go to “Tools -> Script Gallery”. In the pop-up window, search for “mail merge”. There are several mail merge script that you can use, but the one we are using for this tutorial is “Yet Another Mail Merge”, it’s usually right at the very bottom…

Scroll down to the end of the list till you locate it. Click Install. Google will then prompt you to grant access to the script. Once that is done, it will bring you back to the Spreadsheet. You should now see a new “Mail Merge” option in the toolbar of your email.

Now click “Mail Merge -> Standard Merge”. A window will pop up to prompt you to select the template. Click on the template that you have created and saved earlier.

Click “Send Mails”.

That’s it.

Your email will be sent to all the recipients in the list with their details merged. You can go a step further and even add things like membership number, affiliate ID, anything that you want to personalise.

Dead simple huh?!