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Send individual, personalized emails to multiple people with one easy process.

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2016, 2019/365.

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Email Merge, Personalized.docx
53.7 KB Email Merge, Personalized - Solution.docx
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Quick reference

E-Mail Merge, Personalized

Send individual, Personalized (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

  1. Start with Outlook.
     
  2. Click Contacts, and select the folder with the contacts to use in the Email Merge.
     
  3. On the HOME ribbon, click Mail Merge

     
  4. 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
  5. If your list contains Contact Groups, the process will warn you that those will not be included in the Merge.  Click OK.


     
  6. 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 lesson in this course, 'Email Merge, Full Color Flyers' for more information on pre-made flyers).
    1. To Personalize the email message:
      1. Click into the Greeting line of the message, i.e.: Hello ____________
      2. On the Mailings ribbon, Click “Insert Merge Field”
         
      3. Locate and select the field “First Name”
      4. The Greeting line will look like this:
        1. The grey area is the “field code” and the chevrons (arrows) on the sides should not be deleted or the code will break.
           
  7. Take a moment to Preview the emails.
           
     
  8. Click Finish & Merge (on the Mailings ribbon), and then “Send Email Messages”

     
  9. You have ONE LAST CHANCE to change the Subject line and/or cancel the process:

     
  10. 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!

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  • 00:04 Okay, in this lesson I'm gonna show you how to personalize an email merge.
  • 00:08 Again, I'm starting on my contacts.
  • 00:10 I have the contact file that I want to use.
  • 00:12 I come over here to actions and I click Merge.
  • 00:15 I choose, instead of merge to new document,
  • 00:17 we're gonna merge to an email and go ahead and enter the subject line.
  • 00:21 And click OK.
  • 00:22 It recognizes that I have a contact group in there.
  • 00:25 That's okay, I'll bypass that, and it opens up Microsoft Word.
  • 00:28 Microsoft Word and Outlook are linked.
  • 00:31 Now, what I'm gonna do is enter the text of my email.
  • 00:37 When the text is entered, Alls I'm gonna do now is replace this line on the hello,
  • 00:42 with the personalization.
  • 00:45 All right, so I've selected that line.
  • 00:46 That's where I want my field to go.
  • 00:49 And if you take a look up here on the mailings ribbon.
  • 00:52 You have this group called right in Insert fields.
  • 00:54 Here's an Address Block.
  • 00:56 Now Address Block will basically put in the address, city, state, zip for you.
  • 01:00 It looks into the contact, and pulls out those fields.
  • 01:04 The Greeting Line, they'll put in the Dear or
  • 01:06 the To, and they'll formalize how you want you first line to look.
  • 01:10 And you can even choose the ending right here.
  • 01:13 And so I'm not gonna use any of that, but I want you to know is available if you
  • 01:16 want to eliminate some typing and just have it automated.
  • 01:20 What I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to put my own field in there.
  • 01:24 Again, I selected the area that I wanna use.
  • 01:27 I click the Insert Merge field.
  • 01:29 Here, you are looking at an entire list of all the fields available in every single
  • 01:34 Outlook contact, I'm looking for first name.
  • 01:37 When I click on the first name field, it pops in here and
  • 01:42 as you could see my comma was deleted.
  • 01:45 Outlook would never put I'm punctuation for
  • 01:47 you, you have to put in your own punctuation.
  • 01:50 Now notice that when I click on,
  • 01:51 first name, it all gets gray, cuz it is a field code and
  • 01:55 it is wrapped with these little chevrons, these little arrows are called chevrons.
  • 01:59 If you happen to delete those chevrons, you break the code and it won't work and
  • 02:03 all the emails will say, hello first name.
  • 02:05 We don't want that, so we don't break the code,
  • 02:08 we make sure to kinda tip toe around that code and we go ahead and finish our merge.
  • 02:13 There's one more thing that happened.
  • 02:15 This time, we have a button that has preview results.
  • 02:17 Well, I wanna make sure they look okay, so I click preview results and
  • 02:20 it shows you the result of the first line.
  • 02:23 But I have this these arrows I can go to the second one.
  • 02:25 Now take a look at the Hello as I'm clicking through these,
  • 02:29 showing me how each of these emails will look.
  • 02:32 And I like it, it looks fine with me.
  • 02:34 I'm gonna turn off my preview results, and I'm gonna go ahead and finish the merge,
  • 02:38 I'm gonna send the mail merge.
  • 02:41 This is my last chance to change my subject line and my last chance to cancel.
  • 02:45 I'm gonna hit OK and show you the results.
  • 02:47 Click OK, they sent out of my outbox and
  • 02:52 so here is my email in my sent file, and look at that.
  • 02:57 Every single one of them, take a look down here.
  • 02:59 Says hello, every single one of them is now personalized.
  • 03:04 How great is that?
  • 03:06 Awesome.
  • 03:07 I hope that worked for you.
  • 03:08 Stay with me in the next video.
  • 03:09 We're going to send a flyer with a personal email.

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