Outlook 2010 makes it easy to send mass emails to a selected number of contacts using the common and well known Mail Merge feature from previous versions of Microsoft Office. However when you want to send out a mass (multi-recipient) email with personalized information for each individual… things can start to get a little bit tricky if your not familiar with the process. Good news is, after this groovy Outlook tutorial, you WILL be familiar with the process! Let’s get started!
Note: Outlook 2007 also includes the Mail Merge feature however the screenshots and steps below are taken from Microsoft Outlook 2010.
How To Create Personalized Multi-Recipient Mass Emails Quickly Using Outlook Mail Merge
1. In Outlook, go to your Contacts and Select which contacts you would like to send your mass personalized email to.
2. Next above on the toolbar Click Mail Merge.
3. The mail merge options should pop-up in a new window. At the top, Check Only selected contacts. At the bottom, Set the Document Type to Form Letters, and Merge To to E-mail.
The Message subject line can be set to whatever subject you want the email to have. In this example I want the subject title of all the emails to be Check out our latest article.
Click OK to continue.
When you Click OK a new compose email will open up. From here all of the contacts are stored so no need to worry about adding them unless you forgot someone.
4. In the compose email window, let’s add a personalized Greeting. Click Greeting Line.
5. In the pop-up window you can customize your Greeting line, but default works fine. Click OK to continue. The preview will show what greeting will be displayed for each person receiving the email, but while you are composing it will look like «Greeting Line».
6. Optional: If you have any more custom fields you want to enter Use the Insert Merge Field button to do so, there are a lot of things to choose from, but this will require you have the related information in your contacts profile in Outlook. If you don’t, no worries, just keep on reading!
7. Write your email content! This is the part that will be the same for all recipients.
8. When you are all done writing Click Finish & Merge, then Select Send E-mail Messages…
9. A pop-up will appear to confirm you want to send and the information is correct. Click OK and off the mail goes!
Now you’ve sent out your mass email to all of your contacts! When they receive it it will only show their email under the “to” field. The greeting line and whatever else you decided to personalize will be tailored to their specific information pulled from your Outlook contacts list.
I used to use this feature with MS Word 2000 long long time ago for standard mailings. Didn’t know the feature existed in Outlook.