Mail Merge Emails with Microsoft 365 in Minutes (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Do you need to send hundreds of personalized emails in just a few minutes? In this video, I'll show you how to mail merge using Microsoft 365, connecting Excel to Word and sending everything through Outlook. As a quick note, this requires the classic desktop version of Outlook. It won't work with New Outlook or the web apps. Let's get started. Let's begin in Excel. Mail merge works best when your spreadsheet is clean and simple. At the very top, you should have a single header row with no blank rows above it. Each column header should clearly describe the data in that column. For example, first name, last name, and email address. Make sure you have a column that contains the email address and then every row has a valid email. Word will use this column when sending the messages. Also, make sure there are no completely blank rows in the middle of your data. Blank rows can cause Word to skip records or stop the merge early. Now, let's talk about formatting because this is where most people run into problems. If your dates look wrong in Word, it's usually because Excel is storing them differently than you expect. Just select the column, right-click, go down to Format Cells, and here you can choose the format that you want. For zip codes or ID numbers that start with zero, right-click, go down to Format Cells, and format it as text. Otherwise, Excel will remove the leading zero. For currency or numbers, format them properly in Excel first. Word pulls the value directly from Excel. If it looks wrong here, it'll look wrong in your email. Overall, just keep your spreadsheet simple. No merge cells, no extra formatting, no multiple tables, just one clean table of data. Once everything looks correct, go ahead and save your spreadsheet. Now we're ready to connect this spreadsheet to Microsoft Word. In Microsoft Word, go to the Mailings tab, and over on the left-hand side, let's click on Start Mail Merge. And in this dropdown, select Email Messages. Next, we need to select who we want to send this mail merge to. Up above, let's click on Select Recipients, and we're going to use an existing list. And here, we're going to select the spreadsheet that we just created in Excel. I see my spreadsheet here. I'll select that, and down below, I'll click on Open. Next, we need to select the table to use in this mail merge. If you have multiple tables, select the one that contains your data. I'll select this one. I only have one table in my spreadsheet. Down below, make sure to check First Row of Data Contains Column Headers, then click on OK. Next, type in your message. I've typed this in, and right up above, I say, Hi, First Name. I want to insert the first name from every single row of my spreadsheet. And to do that, we're going to use something called Merge Field. So over here, I'll delete the first name, and right up on top, under the Mailings tab, you'll see the option to Insert a Merge Field. I'll click on that, and in this dropdown, you'll notice that we have all the different headers from the spreadsheet. Now, right up on top, I have a column with the first name, so I'll click on this option, and now it inserts a placeholder for the first name. This is a Merge Field. This will automatically be replaced with each person's information when the emails are sent out. Now, I could go through the rest of my email and update all the other places where I'd like to insert personalized information. Right here, I say Company, so I'll highlight that, and let's go up to Merge Fields, and here I see a column with the company. I'll place that in. I also have the webinar date. I'll highlight that, and let's insert the webinar date. And down below, I also call out the amount due. I'll highlight that, and then replace it with the amount due from the spreadsheet. Now I have all these different placeholders in this document. Now that I've inserted all of my different merge fields, you can format this however you like. As an example, here, I could highlight the first name, and I could go back to Home, and you can make it bold or italics, or you could underline it. You have all of your different formatting controls right here, but I don't need this for this email message, so I'll turn all of those off. Now, let's double-check to make sure everything looks correct. Up on top, let's go back to the Mailings tab, and over on the right-hand side, you'll see the option to preview the results. I'll click on that. Now, this shows you exactly what each recipient will see. Now, right over here, you can use the arrows, and you could scroll through the different records or rows in your spreadsheet, and you could confirm the names, the dates, and amounts are all appearing correctly. Now, the one thing I notice is it says a balance of 320, but it doesn't include a dollar sign in front, so right here, I could add that in. In general, if something looks wrong here, it's usually a formatting issue in Excel, so fix it there first. I think everything here looks good, and I'm ready to send out these emails. Now, if you don't want to send this to everyone, right up above, you could click on Edit Recipient List, and over here, you could sort, or you could filter the list of contacts before sending. This is ideal if you want to, let's say, send a test email first. You could send it to just one record instead of everyone, but in my case, I want to send it to everyone, so down below, I'll click on OK. Let's now go up to Finish and Merge, and right down below, let's Send Email Messages. This opens up a prompt, and first off, we need to select who we want to send it to. Now, select the column in your spreadsheet that contains the email address. Right here, my column is titled Email Address. I'll select that. Right here, you could enter in the subject line, and unfortunately, you cannot customize the subject line for each individual message. Everyone will get the same subject line. Down below, choose the mail format, and I'm going to set it to HTML. This preserves your formatting, and in my opinion, looks the most professional. Now, right down here, you can choose what you want to send. You could send it to all the records, just the current record that you see on the screen, or you could select a range. This is basically the rows in your spreadsheet. I want to send it to all, so I'll select that, and then down below, I'll click on OK. Word will now hand everything off to Outlook, and the emails will begin sending automatically. You can see the individual personalized emails in your Sent Items folder in Outlook. Before we wrap up, here are a few pro tips. Mail Merge sends from the primary account in your Outlook profile. If it's using the wrong address, the cleanest fix is to create a new Outlook profile and add the correct account first. If you want to review the emails before they send directly in Outlook, right up on top, you could click on Send and Receive, and over on the right-hand side, you could turn on Offline Mode. Just make sure to turn this on before you kick off your Mail Merge. Then you could review all the different messages, and if everything looks good, you can go back online, and all the messages will then send out. And one more thing. Traditional Mail Merge does not support personalized attachments. If you need to send a unique file to each person, that requires a different method. And that's how you Mail Merge using Microsoft 365. If something doesn't look right, double-check your Excel formatting, and also confirm you're using Classic Outlook. Thanks for watching.