mail Merge for Gmail lets you send personalized email messages to multiple contacts in one go. The individual messages have almost the same content but some parts of the message can be customized. For instance, you can greet each recipient by their first name, you can include their postal address in the message body, personalize the subject line, attach different files while the other parts of the email body remain the same.
Mail Merge in Gmail is for everyone. If you are organizing a party at your home, you can send personalized email invitations to all your friends with the help of mail merge. A business owner can use mail merge to inform customers about upcoming deals and offers. Sales and marketing teams use Mail Merge for drip campaigns. Teachers can send individual assignments and reports to students through mail merge.
Mail Merge in Gmail
Here’s how you can do mail merge with Gmail:
- Install the Mail Merge for Gmail add-on. Please watch the Mail merge tutorial for instructions.
- This will create a new Google Spreadsheet. Go to the Add-ons menu in the sheet, select Mail Merge with Attachments and then select the Create Merge Tempalte menu.
- Open Google Contacts and create a new Group with all the contacts who you would like to send a personalized email. Alternatively, you can enter the names and email addresses of recipients directly in the Mail Merge Google Sheet.
- Under the Mail Merge menu, choose Import Google Contacts and select the Google Contacts group that you created in Step 3. It will now automatically import all the associated Gmail contacts into the spreadsheet.
- Go to Gmail and create a new draft email messages that will become the template for Mail merge. Alternatively, you can compose an email template in rich text using the HTML Mail tool and then copy-paste the generated HTML code into the message body field of the Google Sheet.
- If you would like to add file attachment to your email messages – say a PDF file or a Word document – just upload the file to Google Drive and then select Insert File Attachments to insert that link of the file into the Mail merge sheet. Mail Merge will automatically insert the actual file into the email.
- Go to the Mail Merge menu again and choose “Configure Mail Merge” – the status column will change to “MAIL SENT” for all email messages that were successfully delivered.
It is always a good idea to test your email campaign before sending a blast to multiple people. On the Configure Mail Merge screen, click the “Send a Test Email” button and it will send a sample email to the developer with the {{Variable Fields}} substituted with dummy values. If all the fields have been replaced in the test email, your mail merge is ready to go.
Gmail Mail Merge F.A.Q.
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions around Mail Merge for Gmail and Google Apps:
1. How many email messages can I send per day?
The free edition of Mail merge lets you send 50 emails per day but the sending limit for Premium merge 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.
2. I am a Google Apps user, yet my daily limit for premium edition is only 250 per day?
Google will increase your limit to 1500 if your Google Apps business account is more than a few months old or if your Google Apps domain has more than 5 users after the 1st billing cycle. Please refer to this discussion on Mail Merge limits.
3. How do I upgrade to Premium? What is the cost of a license?
Please click here to buy the premium license for Mail Merge. A single-user license is $29 while a domain-wide enterprise license is $299. The price is per user (email account) per year. The enterprise license can have unlimited users in the same domain.
4. I’ve sent only 10 emails yet my daily email quota was reduced by 20. Why?
It is likely that you have added an email address in the CC or BCC field. Remember that the daily email limit is in terms of number of recipients so if you send an email that is also cc’ed to someone, it will decrease your quota by 2.
5. What is your privacy policy? Why does Mail Merge require access to my Gmail, Google Contacts, etc.
Mail Merge needs access to Gmail because it sends emails from your Gmail account. It needs access to Google Drive to fetch file attachments while it requires access to Google Contacts to import them into the Google Sheet. Read permissions requirement in detail.