As per recent statistics, more than 1.8 billion population is using Gmail for their daily communication – official and personal. In this COVID19 pandemic, Gmail has become the everyday affair, whether you are on a job or not. As majority of  things have gone online, mail has become an essential thing for multiple purposes. A proper tool of mail merge for Gmail comes handy by this time to increase your productivity via the process of mass mail. 

Among many players, Gmail is the most powerful tool. It can perform many tasks, from simple to complex ones. One of such complex thing, in the arena of multitasking, is mail merge. The applications are endless – online shopping payments and receipts, sending supporting documents, sending and receiving various notifications, email marketing and many more. Professionals, business class, entrepreneurs and many such are already using it for their work related communications.

What is a mail merge?

Mail merge is one the best things in the domain of automation. 

Suppose you want to send a same mail to 2000 people, with proper customization. It means that each user should feel that the mail has been sent to him/her on a personal level. If you try to do it manually, it will take a long time. For such situation, you can use a mail merge. You can use a properly formatted digital file and an email marketing tool to do such thing. Such email customization is called a mail merge. 

Process of a mail merge for Gmail or any other application

1. You need two things for mail merge.
2. Source file – Any digital file that can save structure data. It can be a database file, excel sheet, spreadsheet or anything else. It must have proper data structure of various labels and associated details. From this, all variable data is taken to populate the content. Typical entries are name, contact number, email id, address etc.
3. Any email marketing tool – It has various templates as per work. Examples are reminders for employees, new post published notification to subscribers, new arrival in grocery items, regular reminders of payments, message to general individuals and so on.
4. This marketing tool fetches necessary details from structure data file (individual values from rows of a data sheet), integrate it with the template and shoot an email.
5. By this way, a huge number of people (multiple recipients) can receive a same email at the same time. 

Benefits of a mail merge

• It automates the process of bulk mail. 
• Best tool for email marketing. 
• As mentioned earlier, it sends personalized email / message. They never know that they were part of a mailing list. 
• Its productive tool, which saves a huge amount of time.
• With today’s advanced technology of cloud computing, you have option to choose from a large number of data processing applications. So, you can select the best that suits your needs. 
• You can also schedule the process. So, the user gets in touch with you continuously. 
• It gives you measurable data to calculate your ROI (Return On Investment). It gives various tracking data of email sent, email open, link click, email forward etc. 
• You can also schedule a follow-up marketing campaign based on above mentioned actions. 

Major things to personalize

In a mail content, there are so many touch points that makes it an unique mail for the recipient. Here lies the actual beauty or power of this productive tool. Make sure, your email marketing tool / template must have these data pointes covered.

1. Person’s name in the mail subject line
2. Opening title (Dear ____)
3. Call to action part (click here to know more, voucher code, discount coupon etc.)
4. End of the mail (Kindly share your comments _____)