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About this lesson
Send individual – but duplicate – emails to multiple people with one easy process.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2016, 2019/365.
Quick reference
E-Mail Merge
Send individual – but duplicate – emails to multiple people with one easy process.
When to use
Outlook Email merge will send individual emails to an entire list of contacts. This eliminates the cc: line from becoming bogged down with names. It also protects your contact list from being “harvested” (copy and pasted) into some other recipient’s contact list.
Instructions
- Start with Outlook.
- Click Contacts, and select the folder with the contacts to use in the Email Merge.
- On the HOME ribbon, click Mail Merge
- At the bottom of this box, change Merge to: “E-mail”
and enter a Subject Line topic
Note: you will have a chance later to change or modify the subject line
- If your list contains Contact Groups, the process will warn you that those will not be included in the Merge. Click OK.
- MS Word will open in the background,
Type your email message,
Personalize the fields, and/or Insert a .jpg photo of a pre-made flyer. (See the next two lessons of this course 'Email Merge, Personalized' and 'Email Merge, Full Color Flyers' for how to do this.)
- Click Finish & Merge (on the Mailings ribbon), and then “Send Email Messages”
- You have ONE LAST CHANCE to change the Subject line and/or cancel the process:
- Click OK and the emails will immediately send out.
TIP: Should all go wrong and emails are flying out to the wrong list (Yes, this happens because humans sometimes choose the wrong lists!), switch off your wireless on your laptop, or pull the Ethernet cord from your computer!
Login to download- 00:04 I'd like to introduce you to the Outlook e-mail merge process.
- 00:07 This is done in contacts, but I do have to tell you the reason we're doing this.
- 00:11 I go back to my e-mail and
- 00:13 hit brand new e-mail, we don't want to load up 50 people on the CC line.
- 00:17 It looks unprofessional, cluttered, and then you're sharing all your Friends and
- 00:22 family and business contacts with everyone else.
- 00:24 So we wanna preserve the integrity of our contact list and
- 00:27 just send out individual emails.
- 00:30 So we're gonna go back into Contacts.
- 00:32 I'm gonna work with my Contacts folder.
- 00:33 You would select which folder you wanna work with.
- 00:36 Up here on Actions, we have Mail Merge.
- 00:38 When I activate Mail Merge, up comes a new screen.
- 00:41 I'm gonna ignore all of this except for right down here, the Merge to,
- 00:44 hit the drop arrow, and choose Email.
- 00:47 Now it asks me to type the subject line.
- 00:49 And I'll tell you that you will have the chance to change this again before we
- 00:53 finish this.
- 00:54 I'll click OK, and it sees a group email, or a group contact in there, that's okay.
- 00:59 I'll go ahead and ignore that as well.
- 01:01 And now Microsoft Word opened up on my screen,
- 01:03 and Microsoft Word is the editor for Outlook.
- 01:07 They work hand in hand, so Word will open.
- 01:10 If your process isn't working, make sure you have Microsoft Word installed.
- 01:14 What I'm gonna do is go ahead and type in my email message.
- 01:19 All right my email message is typed in and
- 01:21 notice I have the Mailings ribbon up on top that is activated.
- 01:25 There's quite a few different options in here, but the Edit Recipient List is
- 01:29 pretty important because if you do have a long list,
- 01:31 you can actually uncheck a couple of these that you don't want to receive the email.
- 01:36 You can sort these and, right down here, you can actually filter these by zip code,
- 01:40 by company name, by state.
- 01:42 Just so you know you have the option to get very choosy on your recipient list.
- 01:46 Right over here we have Insert Merge Field.
- 01:49 Please watch the next video on how to work that one and at the very end,
- 01:53 we would hit Finish & Merge.
- 01:56 When I click, Finish & Merge, it asks me, do I wanna Edit, Print, or Send?
- 02:00 I'll go ahead and Send email messages but just so
- 02:03 you know, you have one more chance to stop this process.
- 02:06 So, Click Send Email Messages.
- 02:09 It's going to confirm, you do want to send emails, this is your subject line,
- 02:13 I can change that now if I want.
- 02:15 Mail format is HTML, which means I could color and
- 02:18 format the background of this email all I want, and do I wanna send all records,
- 02:22 current records, just from certain records.
- 02:25 I'll leave it at all and now right here is my last chance to cancel this process.
- 02:31 So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna hit OK.
- 02:34 So when I click OK, this screen changes but this stays open.
- 02:40 So I'm gonna minimize this.
- 02:42 I'm gonna go to my email and we're gonna take a look at my outbox.
- 02:47 Okay, my Outbox is empty cuz it happens that fast!
- 02:50 It's lightning fast, but I'm gonna take a look at my sent items.
- 02:52 Now me sent items, there they are.
- 02:55 All those emails went out, they all have the same subject line on them.
- 02:58 So those are the ones I just sent, it's a fast process, it's an efficient process.
- 03:03 But let's enhance that.
- 03:04 Watch the next video on how to personalize the process.
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