Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs

Let’s say you are organizing a party at your place and want to send personalized email invitations to all your friends. Or say your company is about a launch a new product and you want to share this with media and customers through email.

In both the above examples, all your email messages will essentially have the same content but some elements will be unique (like the recipient’s name) in every copy. For instance, when you are sending a casual email to friends, you might want to have “Hi [Friends’s nickname]” as the greeting while in the case of customers, you will prefer a more formal greeting with their first names.

Mail Merge can obviously save you plenty of time as you can send personalized email messages to multiple people at once. The feature is neither available in Gmail nor Google Apps but there are workarounds like:

Option #1. You can connect your Gmail account with Outlook and then use the Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Office Word to send bulk email messages through Gmail but from your desktop.

Option #2. You can use web based services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc. for sending personalized mass emails but they aren’t free.

If none of the above options work for you, here’s a third and better solution – you can setup Mail Merge in Gmail through your Google Docs account – it’s both free and easy to setup. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Assuming that your already have a Gmail account, go to your Google Contacts and create a new Group (let’s say “Media”). Add all the contacts to this group who you want to send a personalized email.

Step 2: Create a copy of this spreadsheet into your own Google Docs account.

Step 3: You’ll see a new “Mail Merge” menu in Google Docs near “Help.” Click “Import Gmail Contacts” and authorize Google Docs to access your Google Contacts.

Step 4: Click Mail Merge –> Import Gmail Contacts again and type the name of the Gmail group (“Media”) that you created in Step 1. Google Docs will now automatically import the relevant Gmail contacts into the spreadsheet.

Step 5: Fill the various fields of the email template (highlighted in green). Change the email subject, email body (line 1-5), fill in your name and also the reply-to email address.

Step 6: Go to the Mail Merge menu again and click “Start Mail Merge” – the status against the names of your Gmail contacts will change from “Pending” to “OK” for all email messages that are successfully delivered through Google Docs.

That’s it! You’ve just completed your first mail merge through Gmail and Google Docs. If any of the steps are not clear, please watch the following video screencast.

Custom Email Templates for Mail Merge

If you would like to use a different email template with mail merge, you can go to Tools –> Scripts –> Script Editor and change the sendEmail() function accordingly.

Here’s the full source code of the macro that runs on the Mail Merge spreadsheet but before you make any changes, please read this section to get yourself familiar with the Google Docs’ scripting environment. Google Docs also supports file attachments and HTML emails so you can be more creative with your email templates.

I have used this in batches of 10-20 email addresses and that has worked without issues but I’m not sure if the Gmail sending limit (that can temporarily lock accounts) applies to Google Docs or not.

Also, the above spreadhsheet uses Gmail but you can also use it with Yahoo! Mail or your Windows Live Hotmail contacts. I’ll share the exact steps in a later tutorial.