YAMM Mail Merge: How to Send Mass Email

Before you begin: set up your environment

There are a couple of things you will need for this:

1. A Gmail account. You can set up one here if you haven’t done it already.
2. Install the Google Sheets add-on called Yet Another Mail Merge.

Create your Gmail Bulk Outreach Database Sheet

Once you are all set up, you will have to create a database with all of your Google contacts’ information. However you get these email addresses, you should put them in a Google sheet. So, here are the steps to follow for this:

1. Create a new Google sheet using your Google account;
2. Name it (in my case, this was “Gmail Bulk Outreach Database”);
3. Set the columns for your database of email recipients:

• First Name;
• Last Name;
• Email;
• Phone;
• Company;
• Title;
• Another Piece of Data (something you can use to personalize your emails).

Keep in mind: aside from the “First Name” and the “Email” column, all of the other columns are optional—you can use as much data here as you’d like.

However, you should gather as much information as you can about the contact group you are sending your outreach emails to—it will help you personalize the emails and increase the response rate.

4. Populate the sheet: it can consist of current customers or information you gathered using a LinkedIn scraping tool, for example.

Enable the “Canned Response” feature in Gmail

Enabling the “Canned Response” feature in Gmail will allow you to create an email message template to use with your outreach campaign, so you don’t have to type them every single time.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Open Gmail;
2. Click on the little gear icon → settings;

3. Click on the “Labs” tab;

4. Type “canned responses” into the search bar;

5. Click on “Enable”;

6. Click on “Save changes”.

Write the Email Templates Using Canned Response

Once you have enabled canned responses, you can start writing your mass email templates.

So, here’s how I write canned responses:

1. Open Gmail.
2. Start writing an email draft just as you would normally, according to the purpose of your outreach email campaign.

• In my case, I pretended this was a sales email and I’m selling widgets, trying to find the best person to talk to at the company to reach out to and talk about my products. So, my first draft email template was this:

3. Once you have drafted your email template, you have to replace the variables in it (e.g. the First Name, the Company Name, etc.). To do it, follow these steps:

a) Go to your Gmail Bulk Outreach Database.
b) Copy column header for the contact’s first name, in my case: “First Name”.
c) Paste it to replace the actual first name in your email.
d) Add double curly brackets at the beginning and end of “First Name”.
e) Repeat this with all the variables in your email template.

• Keep in mind, these variables are case-sensitive. For instance, in my Google Sheet column, “First” and “Name” are both capitalized, so I need to use them the same way in my canned response as well (if I typed it in lower case, this wouldn’t work).
• Your “Another Piece of Data” can be anything that makes the email more personal. For instance, I added “like dogs” to my first entry in the Google Sheet, under the “Another Piece of Data” column. So, at the end of the email template, I added “By the way, I heard you {{Another Piece of Data}}”.
• This is how my email looked after replacing all the variables:

4. Click on the little arrow next to the trash bin in your email.

5. Click on “Canned Responses” → “New canned response…”.

6. Enter the name of your new canned response. In my case, this was “Quick Question For You” (the subject line I used for the email template).

7. Click “OK”.
8. Check to see if your canned response was correctly added. Open a new email, go to “Canned Responses”, and see if your newly added one is there. Once you click it, the email body should be automatically filled out with your email template text.

9. Be very, very particular about the email outreach and data privacy laws in your country. These laws change all the time, so it’s always best to talk to a professional in the field about it. For example:

In the United States, there are a couple of things you need to think about before sending out an email outreach campaign:

• You need to be honest about your email outreach. Do NOT be deceptive about it, do not make the subject of the emails something entirely different than whatever you’re doing.
• Include an unsubscribe link to give users a way to opt-out easily if they don’t want you to contact them again. You can easily do this with “Yet Another Mail Merge”:
  • Write your “unsubscribe here” text (e.g. “Click here to unsubscribe from these emails”). You can add this at the bottom of your email, for example;
  • Highlight this text;
  • Add a hyperlink to it, linking to “https://yet-another-mail-merge.com/unsubscribe”. In my case, I added this at the end of the message body, right after my signature.

• Put your actual address in the footer of the email. You can easily just type this out at the bottom of your email, as a signature, maybe with a smaller font, and save it to all of your canned emails.

In the EU, these laws are even more specific, so it is VERY important to check them out and make sure your outreach emails comply with the current legislation.

Install Yet Another Mail Merge Add-on

Now that you have your database set up, your merge template email did, and your canned responses are enabled, you should install the actual Google Sheets add-on that helps you send out the outreach emails.

To add it to your Google Sheets, follow these steps:

1. Go to the sheet you previously created.
2. Go to Add-ons → “Get add-ons”.

3. Search for “Yet Another Mail Merge”.

4. Click the “+Free” blue button.

5. You will get a pop-up on the screen and you will be asked to authenticate with your email address. Go ahead and do that.

6. Click on the blue button saying “Allow” to give the add-on the necessary permissions.

Merge the Canned Response Email Template and the Outreach Database

You’re all set up now—all that’s left is to do the actual merge:

1. Go to your Gmail Bulk Outreach Database sheet;
2. Click on “Add-ons” in the menu;
3. Click on “Yet Another Mail Merge”;
4. Click on “Start Mail Merge”;

• The free version of “Yet Another Mail” merge will allow you to send up to 50 emails a day for free. If you pay for it, they will allow you a little bit more. And if you’re using a non-Gmail address (i.e. Google Enterprise), you will be allowed to send even more emails (because you are more trustworthy as a Google Enterprise user). YAMM Mail Merge

5. Leave the “Sender Name” field as it is;
6. Click the drop-down under “Email Template” and select the template that you wrote;

7. Leave “Track emails opened, clicked or bounced” checked.

8. (Optional) Click on “Alias, filters, personalized attachments”. This is where you can change the reply-to address, check if the email unsubscribe link is detected by the add-on, and so on. Once you’re done with all of these, click “Back”. YAMM Mail Merge

9. Click “Receive a test email” to check in different if everything is in order.

10. Once you checked and made all the necessary edits, you can hit send. YAMM Mail Merge

• You can also delay the sending of the email by clicking on “Delay delivery” and setting this up.

11. Click “OK” on the pop-up that will appear on the screen.
12. A new column will appear in your Google spreadsheet (“Merge status”), as well as a sidebar that will show you basic information about the emails you have just sent out (e.g. how many opened, how many receivers replied, and so on).

That’s it! That’s how you send bulk outreach emails using Gmail! This is an easy method that works very well when you are just starting and building your email list – use it wisely! YAMM Mail Merge

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The article was originally published here. YAMM Mail Merge

To get more knowledge about YAMM Mail Merge, please visit our site: www.techmistake.com