How to Use Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs ?

Suppose at your home there is the party or any function and you want to invite your all friends. Or say your company launching one new product and you want to share with media and customers using email.

In both above case you have to send invitation to all using their email in that invitation there is most off things be common, but some of content may be unique say recipient’s name in each copy. For instance, when you are sending a casual email to friends, you might want to have "Hi Friends’s nickname" as the greeting while in the case of customers, you will prefer a more formal greeting with their first names.

Mail merge helps you to save your lot's of time as you can send personalized email messages to multiple people at once. For mail merge you may use two facilities :

1) . Connect your mail account with outlook and use mail merge of MS word for sending bulk email message using your mail but from desktop.

2) . You can use web based services not free of cost like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc. for sending personalized mass emails .

If you think both of these option for mail merge is not for of your work then, here is the third option - you can set up Mail Merge is Gmail using your Google Docs account which both are free of cost and also not desktop solution. Let's get started ..

Step 1 . Assuming that you have Gmail account and also Google Docs account. Now go to your Google Contacts page and create a new Group say "invitation". Add all the contact in this group to whom you want to send invitation.

Step 2 . Create new copy of this spreadsheet in your Google Docs account.

Step 3 . Now see 'Mail Merge' menu near to your 'Help' menu (As seen in image) . Click on 'Import Gmail Contacts' & authorize Google Docs for access your Gmail contacts.
Step 4 . Click Mail Merge –> Import Gmail Contacts again and type the name of the Gmail group ("invitation") that you created in Step 1. Google Docs will now automatically import the relevant Gmail contacts into the spreadsheet.Step 5 . Fill the different field of email template shown in green color. Change email subject, email body (1-5 lines) , fill in your name and also the reply-to email address.

Step 6 . Go to the Mail Merge menu again and click "Start Mail Merge" – the status against the names of your Gmail contacts will change from "Pending" to "OK" for all email messages that are successfully delivered through Google Docs.

And that's the way you created your first mail merge using Gmail and Google Docs. If you not understanding about any step then look at this video, which may helps to you.

Different Email Templates for Mail Merge

If you want to change the templates of Mail Merge then you can go Tools -> Scripts -> Scripts editor and change SendEmail() function accordingly.

Amit Agrwal (Digital Inspiration) posted full source code for macros which runs at Mail Merge but you also can change it by learning script writer using this section. Google Docs also supports file attachments and HTML emails so you can be more creative with your email templates.

Here I have used Gmail account email addresses but you can also make spreadsheet of your Yahoomail and Hotmail contacts in Google Docs.

Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs Video