When I was in school, the technology part of my brain blossomed. But the school’s MS Office computer classes never ignited my passion. Sure, it’s something useful, something that will get us a job one day. However, I hate it. The worst is learning mail merge.
I tried it in school, college, and the brief time I spent with an accounting firm. It never works the way I want it to. More importantly, I never “get it”. Now, I have the utmost respect for the people who work with the Office suite day in and day out, because believe me, it wasn’t easy.
Although I don’t like MS Office’s mail merge implementation, I still get the gist of it. It’s better than just sending out a mass email with no personal greeting, and for some people, setting up a newsletter just for a mass email might not be worth it. There’s no reason mail merge shouldn’t be part of your workflow/business life, but there are better ways to handle it outside of the MS Office world.
That’s why I’m happy to tell you about an alternative that’s intuitive, easy to use, and really effective. It works as an add-on to Google Docs (sorry MS Office users, but maybe it’s time to look into Google Drive’s online/offline productivity suite). The add-on comes from MailChimp, one of the best and easiest email newsletter services out there.
Step 1: Create a spreadsheet with recipient details
Before we begin, go to Google.com/Sheets, create a new spreadsheet, and enter your recipient details in the correctly labeled rows. starts with First name, Surname, And Email. You can put in fields like Address or anything else related to your work.
Once that’s done, close the tab and start working on the actual email.
Step 2: Install the Merge Utility Using MailChimp
Go to Google.com/Docs, create a new document, give it the name you want, go to add-ons -> Get add-ons, and find Merge using MailChimp. Download the add-on and wait a few seconds for it to install.
Step 3: Create Email Content
This is where you do what you have to do. Google Docs has tons of templates and add-ons to create attractive page layouts. Inserting charts, images, and other multimedia is also quite easy.
Step 4: Mail merge
When the email content is ready, go to add-ons -> Merge using MailChimp -> Send email. This will trigger a pop-up explaining the steps you need to take before you can send an email.
Now, from the selector, select the spreadsheet that we created in step 1.
You will see a sidebar pop up with the analyzed and processed spreadsheet data.
It already knows which is the header row, which is the header row, and more importantly, which row contains the email. Of course, you are free to change the details if you want.
Step 5: Customize Mail Merge
Since this is “mail merge” and not just mass mailing, you can do things like add the recipient’s name to the top or anywhere in the document you want.
To do this, click the . button Merge cards button from the sidebar. This will generate one tag for each row.
Now select the place in the document where you want to insert the corresponding data and click the tag button (for example: First name). Do this for all the essentials.
Step 6: Enter sender information and send
From the email info tab, enter the sender’s name, sender email, email subject line, and company name and address at the bottom of the page.
Click Send email and your personalized bulk email is rolling out. Easy, right?
Now that the email has been sent, you can track the progress and see how many of them have been opened since Report option in add-ons part. Using this add-on you can send up to 6000 emails per month. Also, when you are using the service of an established newsletter company to send emails, it will have an “Unsubscribe” link and the MailChimp logo at the bottom.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
