Mail Merge for Gmail is the ultimate journalistic outreach tool for marcom and PR professionals. Send personalized and targeted email pitches and press releases to your media contacts via Gmail.
John is a public relations professional and needs you to email press releases and event invitations to journalists, bloggers and influencers.
It can be slow to reach individual journalists, so how do you send the same email to multiple people at once? Some people use the BCC option in Gmail – write a single email, put all the recipients’ email addresses in the BCC field and hit send.
That’s obviously the easiest option for sending bulk emails through Gmail, but such generic email pitches are unlikely to go unnoticed.
Send email pitches through Gmail
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can use Gmail and Google Sheets to send personalized email pitches to your media contacts. You’ll be able to schedule your press releases in advance and track which influencers have seen your emails.
The big advantage is that, unlike other mass email programs, messages sent through Mail Merge are delivered directly to the inbox just like regular emails.
Let’s begin:
How to use Mail Merge with Gmail
Go to the Google Workspace Marketplace and install the Gmail Mail Merge Addon. You need to grant certain permissions so that the add-on can send emails from your Gmail accounts. It also needs permission to attach files from your Google Drive.
Now that the add-on is installed, type sheets.new To create a new Google Sheet in your browser. Within the sheet, go to the Expand menu, select “Mail Merge with Attachments” and then select the “Create Merge Template” menu.
Your sheet now has all the necessary columns needed to run a mail merge but can add more columns. We will add Location and News Outlet Columns shown in the screenshot above.
The next task is to get the media list on this Google Sheet. You can either import groups from Google Contacts, from your Mailchimp campaigns or, if you’re an Excel user, export as CSV and import the CSV file directly into Google Sheets.
Create an email template for the merge
Open your Gmail, create a new email message (see screenshot) and save the template to your Drafts folder. Could be email {{markers}} Double curly brackets are enclosed and these are replaced with the actual values from the Google Sheet in your outgoing emails.
When we enclose some text inside two curly brackets, it becomes a marker and these are replaced with values in the sheet. You can also add emojis to the subject and body.
Next, we can add some attachments to our email template. You can upload files from your computer or you can import them directly from your Google Drive.
Configure and run Mail Merge
Now that our email template in Gmail is ready, go back to your Google Sheets and choose Configure mail merge From the Mail Merge menu under Add-ons.menu.
Follow the step-by-step wizard to configure Merge but there are a few important things you should know.
- You can send emails on behalf of any email address that is associated with your Gmail account as an alias. So an intern can send emails on behalf of an administrator while logged into their Google account.
- You can add a CC or BCC email address and all your merged emails will be copied to them as well. Remember that Gmail counts each CC or BCC recipient as a separate email and thus it counts towards your daily email quota.
- Mail Merge includes email tracking so you can know who opened your email or clicked links. For email newsletters, you can also include an unsubscribe option in your email messages.
After the configuration is done, go to the Send Email section, select the Send Test Email option and press the Go button.
Mail Merge will take the merge data from the first row of the Google Sheet and send you a test email. You can find the test email in your Gmail Sent folder.
If you’re satisfied with the test email, go back to the Google Sheets, select the Run Mail Merge option and press Go to do the live merge. That’s what happened.
Emails will be sent immediately and you can check the Mail Merge Status column on the sheet to track the sending progress.
You can add more rows to the Google Sheet to send the same email to another batch of people and when you send, Mail Merge will automatically ignore the rows that have already been emailed.
Mail Merge – Tips and Tricks
- You can schedule emails – just add the date and time in the Scheduled Date column and merge again to schedule the emails.
- If you have multiple rows in a sheet, you can hide those rows in Google Sheets and stop sending emails to specific rows. Alternatively, you can use filters in Google Sheets to show only rows that match certain criteria. When you merge again, emails will be sent only to the visible rows.
- If you want to cancel scheduled emails, you can either clear the Due Date column or you can go to the Mail Merge menu, choose Help and click on the Cancel Scheduled Mail option.
- With mail merge you can also send different attachments to different people. See the how to guide.
- You can also create drafts with Mail Merge and this is a useful option if you want to manually review emails before sending them to real people.
Install Mail Merge