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About this lesson
Send individual, personalized 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, Personalized
Send individual, oersonalized (but duplicate) emails to multiple people with one easy process.
When to use
Outlook email merge will personalize individual emails, but allow you to send to an entire list. Market research shows that an email is 80% more likely to be opened when it contains the recipient’s name in the first line.
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.
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[1].
Personalize the email message
- Click into the greeting line of the message, i.e.: Hello ____________
- On the Mailings ribbon, click Insert Merge Field.
- Locate and select the field First Name.
- The greeting line will look like this:
- The grey area is the field code and the chevrons (arrows) on the sides should not be deleted or the code will break.
- Take a moment to preview the emails.
- 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!), close Outlook asap, switch off your wireless on your laptop, or pull the Ethernet cord from your computer!
[1] www.GoSkills.com, Email Merge, Full Color Flyers, Lesson 7.03
- 00:04 Okay, picking up from the last video, we're going to do the mail merge again,
- 00:09 a little faster this time.
- 00:10 But we're going to personalize this, individually personalize each item.
- 00:14 I am in My Contacts, on top of My Contacts is the Mail Merge button.
- 00:19 When I activate my Mail Merge button I'm going to go through the same thing,
- 00:23 I want to Merge to Email.
- 00:24 There we go and go ahead and put in a brand new subject line, so
- 00:28 I can keep track of all the emails I'm sending out.
- 00:31 I'll go ahead and click OK on this and, of course,
- 00:34 obediently Microsoft Word opens right up and to the Mailings ribbon.
- 00:39 All right, at this time, I'm just going to go ahead and paste in my message,
- 00:43 it's basically the same message with one slight change.
- 00:46 In this case, I want to replace the Hello line with their first name.
- 00:51 The only place to get that is on the Mailings ribbon, and
- 00:54 here is a button that says Insert Merge field.
- 00:56 Let me double-click that first of all to select that entire section.
- 01:00 When I click the Insert Merge field, when I hit the drop down arrow.
- 01:04 You may not know this, but every Outlook contact has about 100 fields in it.
- 01:09 That you can choose from and you can actually customize into an email.
- 01:14 I mean, look at all those, I'm just scrolling through these, so
- 01:18 the one I'm looking for is First Name.
- 01:20 When I double-click first name, take a look at what happens on the Hello line.
- 01:24 Double-click, there we go, now when I click back on here, let me scroll down so
- 01:29 you can see this.
- 01:30 When I click on this, I can click Hello and it's just a word.
- 01:33 But when I click First Name, the whole section turns gray, because it is a field.
- 01:37 It's actually talking to the Mail Merge process and
- 01:40 notice these arrows to the right and to the left.
- 01:43 Those are called chevrons, those are field codes.
- 01:46 If I were to accidentally backspace and wipe out one of those,
- 01:50 let me see if we can do it.
- 01:51 If I were to wipe out that code, I would send out all the emails.
- 01:54 And each one would say Hello First Name, Hello First Name, Hello First Name.
- 01:58 You do not want to accidentally delete those arrows, just leave them alone.
- 02:03 Now a brand new button showed up that wasn't here the last time because
- 02:07 we hadn't personalized anything.
- 02:10 Check this button out, ABC preview result with the chevron arrows,
- 02:14 watch what happens.
- 02:15 I'm going to go ahead and click this, and now I can hit my forward arrow.
- 02:20 Hello, Lonny, Hello Benny, Hello Bob, Hello Carry, I don't have a comma.
- 02:26 I think I should have a comma there, well,
- 02:28 I'm going to turn off my Preview Results to see what happened.
- 02:31 Microsoft Outlook will never assume your punctuation,
- 02:34 you've got to make sure to type whatever punctuation you want to show up.
- 02:38 All right, at this point, when I Preview, I can hit my arrows and there we go.
- 02:44 So now we're ready to finish this merge, I'm going to turn off my preview results,
- 02:48 just as a habit.
- 02:49 And I am going to slide this over because again,
- 02:51 I do want you to see the results on my email in the background.
- 02:55 When these actually start sending out.
- 02:57 Finish and Merge and I'm going to send e-mail messages.
- 03:01 One last chance to change my subject line and I'll just hit OK,
- 03:04 and take a look at the outbox.
- 03:06 Here we go, click OK, and there they go, they're building up and
- 03:10 now they're going to.
- 03:11 Now they're sending because the numbers are getting lower, so
- 03:14 I'm going to go ahead and come out here to my Sent Items.
- 03:17 When I click on Sent, you can see each one of these has sent.
- 03:21 Where is my reading pane?
- 03:24 Let me see, I put my reading pane on the right-hand side, so
- 03:27 you can see the each one is absolutely personalized on the right-hand side.
- 03:32 This is so professional, it's so great and it's so easy to do.
- 03:36 It's hard the first couple of times,
- 03:37 but the more you do this, the more you're going to learn.
- 03:39 Okay, there's one more video about this,
- 03:41 we're going to send a full-color flyer next.
- 03:44 Watch the next video!
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