How to send bulk email messages in Outlook with Mail Merge

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 the organizational goals. Apart from business, there may be several occasions wherein you may want to send bulk emails invitations, newsletters and announcement letters to many addresses.

However, most of the email accounts support an only 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 Mail Merge feature of Microsoft Word with Microsoft Outlook.

Unlike broadcasting email to a large number of people, the mail merge keeps the message 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 of the applications. It allows you to create a batch of personalized email messages from the letters and automatically fetches the address of the 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 the Microsoft Office programs. Microsoft Word allows you to insert content from the data sources like an access database, excel spreadsheet, etc. into the Word documents using a mail merge feature. That being said, Microsoft Outlook can gain an advantage of the 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 document that contains fixed contents ie; body of the email and then add unique details for every documents like the name or address of the recipients which is usually borrowed from the data source like Outlook Contact, excel spreadsheet or access database . The mail merging involves preparing your main documents, creating a data source for your mailing list, defining the merge fields, linking mailing list to the document, saving and sending the 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 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 radio button with option Only selected contacts under Contacts to send emails to only selected contact. Else, click on the radio button with option All contacts in the current view.

Next, select the radio button with option New document under 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 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  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, the Microsoft Word automatically merges the emails and sends personalized email 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!