What do you do with all of the business cards that you collect at networking events, expositions, foot prospecting, etc.? Do you have business cards piling up on your desk because you’re too busy to keep up with them, and now it will take forever to individually send out an email to all of them? With Microsoft Word, you can send out an email blast to the people you met at the networking event last week or the trade show you attended, yesterday. The greatest part of about the email blast is that with the mail merge, you can create an email that will be personalized for all of your contacts! Read on to learn how to use the mail merge wizard in Word, so that you can finally clear your desk of business cards!
What You Need To Do Before You Start The Mail Merge
Before you start, you need to type up the email. You can do this in an actual blank email or in Microsoft Word (I prefer to use Word because this is where you will be doing the mail merge). Next, you will have to type up all of the contacts that you want to send the email blast to in an Excel spread sheet (this is the tedious part). In the document, you need to label the first three columns of the first row, as follows:
This is an important part of the mail merge because this allows the Word Document to reference your contact list to insert your contacts first and last name in the salutation/greeting of the email.
Starting the Mail Merge:
If you typed up the email in Word, great! You are almost there. If not, you must copy and paste the drafted email into your current Word document. To start the mail merge, you must do the following:
- Go to the “Mailings” tab
- Select the “Start Mail Merge” option, then from the drop down list, select “Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard” and a task pane will pop up to the right of the screen.
- From the task pane, select the type of document that you are working on–“Email messages.”
- At the bottom of the task pane, click the “Next: Starting document” link
Now, since you typed your email into the current Word document, under “Select starting document,” you can “Use the current document.” The, click the “Next: Select recipients.”
Since you typed up the Excel spreadsheet of your contacts, you can just “Use an existing list” and select the “Browse” option.
- Select the Excel sheet with the contacts
- Choose the sheet that you want to use for the mail merge (Sheet1$, Sheet2$, or Sheet3$), then click “OK.” A dialogue box will pop up to show you all of the contacts. Review them to make sure they are all correct, then click “OK.”
In the greeting of your email, select the “Insert Merge Field” in the “Mailings” tab.
- From the drop down list, choose “First.” Then repeat this step to insert “Last.” Make sure to put a space between “<<first>>” and “<<last>>”
- Select the “Next: Preview your e-mail message.”
Here you can view all of your recipients name in the email by clicking the next arrows:
You are almost done! Now click the “Next: Complete the merge” and select the “Electronic Mail…” link. A dialogue box will pop up:
All you have to do here is pick a catchy subject line for you email blast. Once you have chosen the subject, click “OK” and wallah! Your email blast was successful!
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