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Overview
Outlook Mail Merge allows you to send personalized messages that can be sent out to a large number of recipients.
Instructions:
Select contacts
- Open Outlook. Go to “Contacts” and select the people you want to mail by “Ctrl +” clicking the multiple names on your contact list. To effectively select the multiple names, opt for “View Arrange by Categories”.
Note: Mail merge does not work with distribution lists.
- On the Home ribbon, under the “Actions” control group, go to “Tools Mail Merge”. The “Mail Merge Contacts” dialog box opens up.
- For the fields bulleted under “Contacts”, choose “Only selected contacts”.
- Within “Merge options”, under “Merge To”, select “Email” from the drop down. A “Message subject line” field appears. Fill it with the common subject. Click OK.
Compose the email in Word
- When you click OK, MS Word starts up and opens a new document with the focus on the “Mailings” tab. You could use the default document or any other template you desire.
- The selection of recipients has already been completed from within Outlook. So, we will use the “Write & Insert Fields” panel to insert our custom fields.
- For greetings, click on “Greeting Line”. Type the greeting as you would like it to appear.
- To insert additional contact specifics (for example, a home address or phone number), click on “Insert Merge Field” for a large drop-down list.
- Write the body of the email in the Word document.
- Once you are finished with the fields you want to include, preview the final look by clicking on “Preview Results” and then moving through your recipients by clicking on the previous and next record buttons in the “Preview Results” panel.
- Click on “Finish & Merge”then “Send E-mail Messages”. The “Merge to E-mail” dialog box will appear. Click OK.
- MS Word then does the job of automatically posting the emails instantly. You can save the document you used for the mail merge, as it also saves the link with the data source (i.e. the contacts).