Mail Merge: How to send a personalized e-mail to many people at once

First of all, this post is dedicated to my aunt Gayla who runs a small business and has a lot of trouble with this feature. This post is not dedicated to those who might use this feature for spamming. :)

Mail merge is a feature of Outlook and Word that allows you to send a set of contacts a personalized e-mail as though they are the only person receiving the e-mail. With this feature, you can personalize the e-mail so that each of your recipients is the only person on the To: line and that the contents of the e-mail change based on information you have for each contact. Instead of starting the e-mail with “To whom it may concern,” you can have Outlook and Word automatically fill in the e-mail with your recipient’s name (e.g. “Dear Dan,”). Mail merge in Outlook is pretty  hidden – most people don’t even know that you can send a personalized e-mail to each contact in a set of contacts the way you can print a set of form letters in Word. As a matter of fact, Outlook’s mail merge feature is built on Word’s functionality, which might add to the confusion. With this post I hope to clarify how to use this feature to send an e-mail to a group of people in your contacts.

The basic steps to creating a mail merged e-mail from Outlook are:

1. Select your contacts in Outlook
2. Select to send an e-mail in the Mail Merge dialog and choose your subject
3. Compose your e-mail in Word – inserting fields where appropriate
4. Preview and Send

If you already have the e-mail you want to send written in Word, start at step 3 and see this help article for more specific steps. (There are also some great step-by-step training videos for this feature on Office Online.)

Step 1: Select your contacts

In Outlook, navigate to Contacts (Ctrl-3) and select the set of contacts you want to send your e-mail to: (hold the Ctrl key down and click on multiple contacts):

Tip: Use categories for the set of people you want to e-mail and then arrange your contacts by category. To send “mail merge” e-mail to each of them, click on the category header.

Note: The mail merge feature does not work with personal distribution lists. (I’m sorry!!)

Note 2: You will only be able to send e-mails to contacts that have an e-mail in the e-mail field.

Step 2: Mail Merge Dialog in Outlook – Choose E-mail

Next, in the menu bar, click Tools, then Mail Merge

to get to this dialog:

First, under“Contacts,” select “Only selected contacts”

Next, under “Merge options”, under “Merge to:” select “E-mail”

A subject line will appear – fill it in with your subject. Note: your subject will be the same for all of your recipients.

Click OK.

Step 3: Composing your e-mail… in Word

Word will be initialized and then appear. When starting a mail merge from within Word, the first step is to select the recipients, but you’ve already done that in Outlook, so the next step is to write the e-mail.

Treat the Word document as the body of your e-mail – because it is. Focus on the Write and Insert Fields group in the Ribbon:

To insert a greeting, click on “Greeting Line”

To insert a field, click on “Insert Merge Field” (on the top for a dialog, or on the bottom half of the button for a drop down list).

Note: There are a lot of contact fields to choose from.

Step 4: Preview your e-mail

Once you have your e-mail the way you want it, you can preview what it will look like before you send it by clicking on “Preview Results” and then clicking on the left and right scroll buttons in the Preview Results group:

Step 5: Send it!

The last step is to send your e-mail. Just click “Finish&Merge” and “Send E-mail Messages…”

Which will bring up this dialog:

Click OK.

You can then watch as Word goes through each of your contacts and sends the mail.

And that’s it!

For more information on this feature see Office Online.

Enjoy!

Melissa MacBeth
Outlook PM

More info on Mail Merge:

Use mail merge to send personalized e-mail messages to your e-mail address list

Webinar: Mail Merge

Use mail merge to streamline mass mailings