Mail merge in Gmail

Quick and dirty solution if you don’t want to spend money on a browser extension

Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

Introduction

Recently, the school district that I work at migrated from Microsoft Office to G Suite. I thought this was a great until I realized that G Suite was missing more than just a few features.

Because of COVID-19, classes were moved online for the 2020–21 school year. This meant that communication through email was going to be extremely important.

What is mail merge?

If you need a brief reminder of what mail merge is, here’s an article from Microsoft with specific details.

Mail merge in Gmail

If you don’t want to buy a browser extension to perform this task, there’s a great article by Google that will help you get this done. You can find it here.

The process is simple:

• Create a copy of their mail merge Google Sheet (you can find it in the link above)
• Import your data into the copied Google Sheet by creating columns (be sure to keep the Recipients and Email Sent columns)
• Open up Gmail and create your email template. Make sure it gets saved as a Draft
• Use {{actual column header}} as a placeholder anywhere within the email subject or body where you want to insert data
• To send, return to the Google Sheet and find the Mail Merge tab and hit Send Email from the drop down menu. Paste in your draft’s email subject and hit OK

Create a mail merge using Gmail and Google Sheets

If you did it correctly, the mail merge process should run and the Email Sent column should populate with the timestamp that specific email was sent.

Be aware that sending emails this way has some limitations, one being a cap on daily emails.