A Beginners Guide to Mail Merge

Picture a situation in which you are just about to leave the office when you are asked to send 200 personal emails to every single employee working in your office. Such a situation can easily spoil your day if you do not know about the magic of Mail Merge. Mail Merge can simplify such complex tasks and save a lot of your time and trouble. This is a great way of sending personalized messages to a large number of people within no time and can also be used for email marketing. Read on to know in detail about this almost magical way of sending personalized emails in bulk.

Mail Merge gives you the freedom of creating one document for every single person in your email list. You can use various versions of Microsoft Word for doing this job for you. You can sit back and relax while your email merge software works for you. Some basic elements are required in all types of Mail Merge. First of all, you need a document that you need to send. Along with this, you will need other details about the person to whom you are sending the information. You can select a main document that has to be sent to every addressee.

The information about the recipient is generally stored in a centrally placed source of data. This centre could be the contact list contained in Microsoft Office Outlook or a table created using MS Word or MS Excel. The information thus produced makes use of columns and rows. The source of data has to be structured in a way that it becomes easy to link the placeholders with information specific to them. This makes mass mailing very easy.

When you are doing mass mailing of  there are certain fields that you have to use, which are called merge fields. These are the placeholders for sending the unique information that is derived from a recipient list. After this, you can use Start Merge in the Mailings tab, which will help you in following a step-by-step guide for completing your Mail Merge. It will also help you in setting up of the main document. Mail Merge offers an array of options as an email organizer, which can be used according to the requirement.

Once you have arranged the main document, which includes information that will remain the same for all the letters and other details that will change according to the recipient, you can use the Preview button for checking how it will look after completion. The wizard will guide you in doing the required amendments and editing after which you can send your email. Alternatively, you can also save the data for future use.