Are you tired of sending out generic messages to your friends or employees? Do you want to create personalized seasonal greetings, labels, or transactional documents for your clients? Look no further! In this tutorial, we will show you how to use Google Sheets and Gmail together to quickly and easily generate and distribute bulk personalized messages. The best part? Your computer will do the repetitive work for you, saving you time and frustration. And the icing on the cake? It’s completely free for personal use or small businesses!
How to Perform a Mail Merge in Google Sheets
Mail Merge is a powerful tool that takes a standard email message, selects information from a data spreadsheet (with each row containing details about an individual recipient), and combines that information to create individualized emails. The spreadsheet template we’ll be using contains a script that guides Google Sheets through this process and automatically sends out the results via Gmail.
1. Open the Google Mail Merge Spreadsheet Example – Click on this Link
2. Click File -> “Make a copy” and give your spreadsheet a name
3. Choose the column headers you want to include in your email
Each column header represents a field that you will include in your email template. For example, the email template we will send out will say “Hello {{First Name}} {{Last Name}},” and automatically fill in all the values from that column.
You can modify and add column headers, but make sure you always have the headers “Recipient” and “Email Sent” as they are required by the script.
In our spreadsheet, we will include the following column headers: “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Recipient,” “Status Level,” “Discount %,” “Start Date,” and “Email Sent.”
4. Create an email in Gmail and save it as a draft
This spreadsheet will send all your emails from your Gmail account. Log in to the Gmail account from which you plan to send the email and create a new email.
Here’s our template:
Subject: [Your Subject Line]
Dear {{First Name}} {{Last Name}},It’s important to note that the email subject is used by the script to know which draft to use.
5. Connect your Mail Merge Spreadsheet to Gmail
Click the “Mail Merge” button at the top of your spreadsheet and select “Send Emails.”
Click “Continue” on the authorization prompt.
Copy and paste the subject line from your draft email and click “OK.”
Click on the Gmail account you want to use:
You will get an error saying “This app isn’t verified,” but this is a Google-provided spreadsheet and is confirmed to be safe. Click “Advanced” and then “Go to Sheets Mail Merge (unsafe).”
Click “Allow” when you receive the notification asking if you want to connect Gmail to your Google Sheets document.
6. Click “Mail Merge” and “Send Emails”
All the recipients in your spreadsheet will now receive a personalized email based on your template.
You can confirm the emails were sent by checking for a date in the “Email Sent” column next to each recipient in your Mail Merge spreadsheet.
Please note that Gmail has limitations on the number of emails you can send per day. If you need to send a large number of emails daily, a paid solution may be a better choice.
Advanced Features of the Mail Merge Spreadsheet
You can unlock advanced features such as BCC and CC fields, a custom sender email address, sender name, reply-to address, and No Reply fields.
- Click on Extensions -> Apps Script.
- Scroll down to the line that says:
// Uncomment advanced settings if necessary (see documentation for limitations) - Several features are disabled with “//” which marks them as comments.
- To activate any of these features, remove the forward slashes and replace them with a valid email address.
If you enjoyed this article on Google Sheets Mail Merge, you might also like some of our other articles:
- Send Email from Google Sheets
- Google Sheets Mail Merge Labels
Want to learn more about the exciting features of Google Sheets? Visit Crawlan.com for more tips and tricks!
Now you’re ready to take your email game to the next level with Google Sheets Mail Merge. Say goodbye to generic messages and hello to personalized communication!
