Gmail Mail Merge Tutorial: Free Email Blast
This Mail Merge for Gmail allows you to send personalized email messages to multiple contacts at once. Each message has almost the same content but you can customize some parts of the message so that there is a sense of personalization.
For example, you can greet each email recipient by their first name. Plus, you can include their postal address in the body of the message, personalize the subject line, or attach different files while the rest of the email body remains the same.
What is Mail Merge?
Mail Merge is a mail merge service from Gmail that makes it easy for marketers to blast email for free.
This service for Gmail is actually provided by Google for all users. If you want to throw a party at your house, you can send personalized email invitations to all your friends or neighbors with the help of mail merge.
If you’re a business owner, you can use mail merge to notify your customers of upcoming offers.
The sales and marketing team of your company can also use mail merge for their campaigns. Meanwhile, school teachers or campus lecturers can send assignments and reports to their students via mail merge.
So basically, you can write one draft email in Gmail, then define the email recipient list in Google Sheets. Later this mail merge feature will send customized emails to all the addresses you have entered in one send.
Mail Merge is a popular feature that with the help of Google Script, you can easily merge mail via your Gmail inbox, various Google Apps, and G Suite.
Mail Merge in Gmail can be said to be good because it is packed with useful features. You can insert different or unique file attachments from Google Drive for each recipient.
In addition, we can write emails in plain text or formatted in rich HTML text. We can open and track emails so we can know if an email has been read. You can also schedule the merge you want to do and send your email later at the date and time of your choice.
Also Read: 5 secret Google Drive features you rarely know
How to Create a Mail Merge in Gmail
First of all, you have to install the add-on first. Once the add-on is installed, follow the steps we provide below:
- Open your Google Sheets, click on the Add-ons menu and you can see a new menu called “mail merge with attachments”.
- Click the “make merge template” menu to clone a blank draft merge template in your Google Sheets. It contains required fields such as first name, email address, etc – but you can add more fields.
- Go to the Import Google Contacts menu to retrieve an existing contact group from Google Contacts to Mail Merge. This can actually save time. But you can also write the first name, email address, and other details of the recipient manually on the existing mail merge sheet.
If you want to add a unique attachment for your recipient, you can add it to the existing File Attachments field. Open your Google Drive, then right-click a file.
After that, select “Get Link” to copy the URL of the file that you can paste into the sheet. You can also include a large number of files but remember to separate the file URLs with a comma.
When you are working on a mail merge, your Gmail will send all the mail right away. However, you can have the option to schedule an email and the program will automatically send it later.
To schedule an email, go to the Scheduled Date field and enter the date and time when you want to schedule the delivery of the email. Use the hh/mm/yyyy hh:mm format.
How to Create a Mail Merge Template
Go to your Gmail account or Gmail Inbox and draft a new message. You can enter one or more variable fields in an email message using the {{field name}} notation and these will be replaced with the actual values from the sheet when the email is sent. If you still have confusion, we will explain it more simply. Check out the following discussion!
Let’s say you want to send an email to a group where all message content is mostly similar except for a few fields like greeting, first name, and city which are unique to each recipient of the message. Then all you need to do is add a column in the sheet for each of the variable fields we’ve mentioned.
Then in your Gmail draft, you can refer to these variable fields as follows {{First Name}}, {{City}}, and so on.
You can include file attachments in your draft message and they will be sent via each email. You can also include images, and animated GIFs, or make your message stand out with rich text formatting.
After your mail merge template is ready…
Once your template is ready, switch to the mail merge sheet and select “Run Mail Merge” to start sending emails.
Select the Gmail draft you created in the previous step and hit the “Run” button. The add-on will send an email directly to the address where the Date Schedule field is empty while others can be added to the queue and will be sent automatically at the date and time you choose.
While merging emails with Gmail is easy to do, you should always test your merge before sending or blasting emails to large groups. Try having a single row of data in your spreadsheet and entering your own email address in the “Email Address” field.
Run the merge as before and then take a look at the “Sent Items” folder in Gmail to make sure that your outbox emails are as expected.
Also Read: How To Connect Domain Email To Gmail Account
Common Problems Occur in Gmail Mail Merge
If you’re sending your mail merge campaign in Gmail with GMAS, or perhaps another mail merge service, there are several reasons why personalization can fail. If you experience that happening, see if any of the reasons below are the cause:
Submission Column Error
GMass, like many other mail merge services, has a “Send Test Email” button. You can enter an email address and get a test email sent to that address.
However, if a campaign you’ve set up to merge with a Google Sheets spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet has columns you use throughout both Subject and Body for personalization, and your test email address isn’t in the spreadsheet either, GMass won’t know what value to add. used for the mail merge process.
Therefore, the mail merge tags will be replaced with empty values, or fallback values if you use the fallback syntax. This is the most common reason why your personalization can fail.
Error Pressing Send Button
While there has been a recent improvement in quality of use that hides the regular Gmail Send button when you have multiple email addresses in the “to” field, there are certain situations where the “send” button is not hidden and can still be clicked accidentally when the intention was to simply click. GMass button.
If you do this, not only will your email be personalized, but a single email may go to everyone in the “to” column, showing your list to everyone on it.
Spreadsheet Formula Writing Error
If you’re trying to personalize a mail merge campaign with recipients’ first names and you see some emails are personalized while others aren’t, you’re likely making the mistake of using {FirstName} as the merge tag when the column in your spreadsheet contains a first name instead of “FirstName”.
When you do this, first name personalization will work for email addresses that are Gmail Contacts where Gmail stores the first name and email address, but will fail for all other email addresses.
Space In Curly Bracket
When you enter personalization tags, make sure they are entered accurately or precisely. In most cases, GMass will give you a click of a button to enter the merge tag of your letter.
The buttons will match the fields in your Google Sheets or the standard nationalized buttons FirstName, LastName, and EmailAddress.
The button, however, can only be used to insert a mail merge tag into the Body. If you want to personalize a Subject, you have to copy/paste the tag into that Subject.
Also Read: How to connect domain email to Gmail account
FAQs Regarding Gmail Mail Merge
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Mail Merge for Gmail and Google Apps:
1. How many email messages can I send per day?
This free edition of the mail merge allows you to send 50 emails per day but the sending limit for the Premium version is different. Gmail users can send emails to 250 recipients per day while the daily limit for Google Apps for Work accounts is 1500 recipients per day.
Google will increase your limit to 1500 if your Google Apps business account is used for more than a few months or if your Google Apps domain has more than 5 users after the first billing round. Please visit the discussion on the topic of Mail Merge limits.
3. How do I upgrade to the Premium version? How much does it cost?
The personal uses license is $29 while the domain-wide enterprise license is $299. The price is per user (email account) per year. Enterprise licenses can have unlimited users on the same domain.
4. I only sent 10 emails but why was my daily email quota reduced by 20?
Chances are you’ve added an email address in the CC or BCC fields. Keep in mind that the daily email limit is in terms of the number of recipients so if you send an email that is also cc to someone it will also lower your quota to 2.
5. What is Mail Merge’s privacy policy, Why does Mail Merge need access to my Gmail, Google Contacts, etc?
Mail Merge requires access to Gmail because it can only send emails from your Gmail account. Need access to actual Google Drive to retrieve file attachments while needing access to Google Contacts to import them into Google Sheets. Please read the licensing requirements in detail.
6. How to track emails that have been opened with this Mail Merge?
Email Tracking is only available in the premium version. During the Mail Merge configuration, select the “Yes” option for the “Track Email Opens” option and the sent email will include a 1×1 cm tracking GIF. To view the report, open the Mail Merge menu and select “Show Email Open Reports”. You can view the date and time when an email was opened by the recipient, the IP address or User Agent of your client. In most cases this is the same as Google’s IP address as Google now stores images on its own servers.
7. How do I enter a different CC or BCC address for each recipient of my email?
Add two additional columns in the mail merge template and set the column names as CC and BCC. Now put the email addresses in this column per row and the combined messages will be grouped to their respective addresses. You can enter multiple emails separated by commas.
8. I sent a merge but the {{First Name}} variable doesn’t replace it properly in the outgoing email, why is this happening?
Chances are you’ve applied some formatting styles to variables in the Gmail draft. An easy solution is to open your Gmail draft, delete the variable and type it again (see the “help” column provided). This will remove any inconsistent formatting. Now switch to the Merge Mail template and configure it using the newly modified Gmail draft template.
9. Why is the option to create Gmail drafts disabled in my mail merge?
The Draft option is only available when you perform a mail merge in plain text or HTML. So it can’t be available if you use readymade Gmail designs as a combined template.
10. How do I include a unique image in all outgoing email messages?
You can create a new column in the Mail merge sheet called Images. Then upload the image to an image hosting site, get the URL of the image, and add it to the sheet-like the code below:
<br> <img src = “image_url” /> <br>In the Gmail draft, add {{Images}} anywhere and then it will be replaced later with the actual image.
11. How do I insert a unique hyperlink into my email message?
Create a new column in the mail merge template called Links (you can give it any name). Now add a link in Google Sheets like the code we show below:
<a href="http://ctrlq.org">Visit our website</a>In Gmail drafts, add {{Links}} and they will be replaced with actual links. You can also use “mail to” to link to an email address.
12. I scheduled an email but why is it being sent right away?
Scheduled emails are sent +/- 30 minutes from the scheduled time. So if you’ve scheduled an email to go out at 2:15 PM, it can pass any time between 2-2:30 PM. Email is scheduled in the applicable time zone in Google Sheets.
13. Do I have to keep my computer open to get scheduled emails sent at a certain time?
No, the Google Add-on can run in the background on Google Server and you can close the Google Sheet after the configuration is done.
14. I’m running out of email quota, how to send email automatically when it’s been reset by Google?
You can add a scheduled date that is 3-4 days from now and run a mail merge. Messages will be scheduled and messages will be sent automatically when your quota has been reset.
15. Why do I run mail merge but can’t send email at all?
You’ve run out of email quota or maybe it’s because the Mail Merge Status column in the spreadsheet is set to “MAIL SENT”. This check is done so that you don’t accidentally send multiple emails to the same address if you run the merge repeatedly.
Also Read: Webmail: Complete Guide To Know Webmails
Conclusion
Through this article, you’ve learned what Gmail Mail Merge really is and how it works for you. You can immediately feel the convenience and advantages of mail merge after you install the add-on and start using its features.
However, you may need to test it first in the way we mentioned above. We have also provided some solutions to common problems with using mail merge in Gmail.
Finally, if you have any questions regarding this Gmail Mail Merge, you can drop your queries in the comment box below.