How to use Mail Merge in Gmail to email multiple people

In today’s digital era, efficient communication is vital for success, whether you’re a professional, marketer, or simplifying email outreach. Picture effortlessly sending personalized emails to many recipients, transforming each message into a custom experience.

No need to imagine— in this post you’ll learn how to use mail merge in Gmail and Google Sheets, a game-changer for seamless, audience-focused communication.

Set up a spreadsheet with your data

Start off with a spreadsheet ready with the data you want to send. Here, we have 4 columns: Name, emails, links on my Drive to two files.

It’s important not to have any other columns with data where the first row is missing. I would keep the sheet to just the data you’re going to use.

Also, make sure the sheet you’re going to use to send is the first sheet in the spreadsheet.

Note, if you have a sheet full of lots of data but not all of it is used, you could always create a separate sheet and with CHOOSECOLS pull in the data. See my post on CHOOSECOLS.

Create the draft mail merge email

Next, open Gmail and click Compose to open the email draft. Then, click on the person icon in the right-hand corner.

Tick “Mail merge” and as we’re going to use data from a Google Sheet, click “Add from a spreadsheet”.

Select the spreadsheet your data is in and click “Insert”.

It will then ask you to select which columns contain the emails you want to send to and the first name and last name columns. If you only have one name, just use the “First Name” one.

This will show you a preview of the recipients and their email addresses. Click “Finish”.

Create the email body and add the merge fields

Now you will see that the “To” field has changed to the spreadsheet. Type in the subject and the content of your email.

To add merge fields, which will pull in the data from your sheet, type @ and then select the name of the column to add it to your email. You can use merge fields more than once in an email.

Previewing your merge fields and setting default values

If you click on a merge field, you can preview what it will send, to check it’s getting the right data. Also, you can set a default value, which will add that value if the cell is blank.

As we can see, it’s picking up the names and emails fine.

To add a default value just type it in here and save it. It’s often better than having blanks in the email.

Once ready, click “Continue”.

You can send yourself a preview first and once happy you click “Send all”.

Finally, the recipients will receive the email with the merge fields replaced with the data from the sheet. For example, here it’s added their name and the two document links from the sheet.

As these are sent via your Gmail, you can see the emails sent in your Sent box.

It’s a really easy way to send emails to multiple people including being able to send them links to documents.

Sharing documents

In the example above, I sent links to the documents on my Drive. Make sure you change the access rights before sending the email, otherwise the recipients won’t be able to open them. For those outside my organisation, I usually change the access to “Anyone with the link” and leave it as “Viewer”.

Preview and PDF options

I also added two different links. One using the “preview” option with Google Docs, which opens the document in preview mode, i.e. without the toolbar, etc.

The other I added the “export” suffix at the end of the URL so that when they click on the link it automatically downloads it as a PDF.

For more Google URL tricks, check out this post.