Mass mailing is an important strategy in digital marketing used to increase sales and promote a brand. An email marketing campaign is essential nowadays for advertising in order to reach a large list of clients and meet organizational goals. Apart from business, there may be several occasions wherein you may want to send bulk email invitations, newsletters, and announcement letters to many addresses.
However, most email accounts support only a limited number of recipients per email message. Additionally, preparing individual letters to many people consumes a lot of time. While there are many services offering a simplified way of mailing bulk emails, the best way to create a personalized email message is using the Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Word with Microsoft Outlook.
Unlike broadcasting email to a large number of people, the mail merge keeps the message the same for several emails, but the name and address of the email are unique with custom details for each recipient. In other words, the mail merge makes each recipient of the email message the sole recipient.
What is Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Word
Mail Merge is a powerful feature supported within most applications. It allows you to create a batch of personalized email messages from the letters and automatically fetches the address of multiple recipients from the database in order to facilitate mass mailing. Basically, Mail Merge means to combine mail and document. Mail merge is supported by all Microsoft Office programs. Microsoft Word allows you to insert content from the data sources like an access database, excel spreadsheet, etc. into Word documents using a mail merge feature. That being said, Microsoft Outlook can gain an advantage of Microsoft Word’s capability to mail merge to send bulk personalized emails to many contacts.
To send bulk email messages in Outlook using mail merge, you have to first use Microsoft Word to create several constant documents that contain fixed contents ie; the body of the email, and then add unique details for every document like the name or address of the recipients which is usually borrowed from the data source like Outlook Contact, excel spreadsheet or access database. Mail Merging involves preparing your main documents, creating a data source for your mailing list, defining the merge fields, linking the mailing list to the document, and saving and sending personalized email messages. In this article, we explain how to send a bulk email message in Outlook using Mail Merge.
Prepare a mailing contact list for Mail Merge
Launch Microsoft Outlook and click on Home tab
At the bottom of the home tab page, click on People to view the contact list.
Select the contact address to whom you want to send the bulk message.
Now navigate to Actions Group in Home tab and click on Mail Merge.
In the Mail Merge Contacts dialogue box, click on the radio button with the option Only selected contacts under Contacts to send emails to only selected contact. Else, click on the radio button with the option All contacts in the current view.
Next, select the radio button with the option New document under the Document file
Under the Merge option select the Document type as From Letters, Merge to as Email, and type the subject for your email in the message subject line box.
Click Ok to apply the settings and Outlook will launch Microsoft Word for you to write the constant message.
Compose personalized email message using Microsoft Word
Outlook launches Microsoft Word.
In the greeting line, type address, like type, hello, and then click on the Insert Merge Field option under the Write & Insert Feild’s group.
Choose the option Name from the drop-down menu, and the Microsft Word will add an email field << Name>> beside the greeting.
You can add other fields from your recipient list to the document like last name, home phone, company name, etc. Once you finish the process of mail merge, the word will automatically replace the email fields with actual information from your recipient list.
Send the email messages
Once you have prepared the email message, click on the Start Mail merge option and select Email Messages from the drop-down menu.
Now click on Finish & Merge button and select send Email messages from the drop-down menu.
The Merge to E-mail dialogue box pops up. Here choose Email for the Message options To and select HTML for the Mail format.
Under send records, click on the radio button All to send all emails at once, or choose the option Current record to send the current emails only.
Click Ok button.
Once done, Microsoft Word automatically merges the emails and sends personalized emails to each address.
It is worth mentioning that the above feature is used to send the email message only. You cannot attach files to an email and also cannot CC or BCC other recipients in a mail.
To confirm that the emails are sent, go to your Outlook and check your sent items folder to review the sent emails.
Hope you like using this feature!
Read: How to add personalized attachments to Email Merge in Outlook
How many emails can you send with Outlook mail merge?
While using Outlook Mail Merge, you have to add the list of recipients in order to send bulk emails. The Business and Enterprise editions of Office 365 allow users to send emails to up to 10000 recipients per day. After the daily email limit is reached, you cannot send emails for the next 24 hours. For example, if you have sent 10000 emails at 9:00 AM, you will not be able to send emails until 9:00 AM the next day.
Read: How to use Mail Merge for Letters in Word
Does mail merge automatically send emails?
You have to configure and set up mail merge using Microsoft Word. When you are done, Microsoft Word will allow you to preview the emails so that you can make changes if you find anything incorrect. After that, when you click on the OK button, Microsoft Word will automatically send emails to the selected recipients.
That’s it. I hope this helps.
Read next: How to add a mailto link in Outlook signature.
