Gmail's built in mail merge functionality can be used with recipients from either Google Contacts or a Google spreadsheet. Merges completed with information from Google Contacts are limited to 'first name', 'last name', 'full name' and 'email' information from Contacts while information pulled from a Google Sheet is limited to what is available in the Google Sheet.
Perform a Mail Merge From Google Contacts.
- On a PC or Mac, open your PSU email in a web browser.
- Click Compose in the upper left to start a new email draft.
- Add the recipients in the To field
- On the right side of the To field click the Use mail merge icon
.
- Click the box to enable mail merge.
- In the message where you wish to add a merge tag, enter @ and select an available merge tag, the merge tags available are:
- @firstname
- @lastname
- @fullname
- @email
- Select the tag and press Enter
- Once the email is complete, click Continue at the bottom of the window.
- At this time a test/preview can be sent to your own email with the Send preview button, click Send all to send the email to all recipients.
Perform a Mail Merge From a Google Sheet
- On a PC or Mac, open your PSU email in a web browser.
- Click Compose in the upper left to start a new email draft.
- On the right side of the To field click the Use mail merge icon .
- Click the box to enable mail merge.
- Click Add from a spreadsheet
- Select the spreadsheet with the data for the mail merge, click Insert.
- Use the drop down fields to select the column in the spread sheet that contains the email and first names, last name is optional. If you only have full names in the spread sheet, set that for the first name drop down.
- In the message where you wish to add a merge tag, enter @ and select an available merge tag, the merge tags will correspond with the top position in each column of the spread sheet.
- Select the tag and press Enter
- Once the email is complete, click Continue at the bottom of the window.
- At this time a test/preview can be sent to your own email with the Send preview button, click Send all to send the email to all recipients.
Useful information for a successful merge
- If a column name contains any characters other than letters and numbers it will be identified by it column position, such as @A for the first column. It might be easiest to keep column names simple for working with them in the email.
- Email addresses with special characters are invalid.
- Your sent emails from a mail merge will appear in your sent box.
- Google Mail Merge can be used to send to 1,500 recipients per day, however, you are limited to 1,000 recipients per Google Mail Merge. ie, two merges would need to be done per day for the 1,500 limit. These limits are set by Google and we can not adjust them.
- Adding an address to the CC or BCC field will use up an additional recipient towards the 1,500 limit per day. For example, adding a colleague in the CC field for a merge containing 500 recipients will use 1,000 of the daily send limit.
Unsubscribed Recipients
When a merge is sent it will contain an unsubscribe link to unsubscribe from future merge emails. The important things to know about the unsubscribe system are:
- Recipients within an organization can not unsubscribe from senders in the same organization, ie @plattsburgh.edu recipients can't unsubscribe from receiving mail merges from other @plattsburgh.edu addresses.
- There is no way to look up who has unsubscribed if emails are going to outside addresses.
- If someone unsubscribes from mailmerges, they can still receive regular emails from the sender.