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Personalized Email Letters
Almost every customer I deal with is using Microsoft Office to create letters, send emails, and track their customers. But, very few know about all the neat features of Microsoft Office that will allow them to have these applications talk to each other. Since the first version of Microsoft Office, the ability to share information from one program into another has always been a selling point. Unfortunately not many users know how to do this. One of the most common data sharing tasks is to create personalized email letters. I’m sure, for many of you, being able to email a letter, specifically addressing your customer’s name and information, sound s difficult, but it’s much simpler than you can imagine.
First step is to use Microsoft Excel create a list of customers. In the top row of the spreadsheet, type the column headings for each piece of information you wish to track. This would be things like Company Name, Contact Name, Address, Email Address, etc. Then below the headings in each subsequent row, type in the appropriate data. You should end up with something that looks like this:
|
1 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
|
2 |
Company Name |
Contact |
Address |
Email Address |
|
3 |
Contractors R |
Joe Smith |
|
|
|
4 |
Real Time Inc. |
Helen Jones |
|
Save it and called it Customer List. The email merging will be done from within Microsoft Word. You can use an existing letter or create a new letter to send to your customers. From within Microsoft Word we’ll use a “Wizard” to assist us in creating and sending the letters. The Wizard steps are the same for all versions of Microsoft Word.
- From Word 2003 go to the “Tools” menu and select “Letters and Mailing,” then “Mail Merge.”
- From Microsoft Word 2007/2010 go to the “Mailings” menu and choose “Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard.”
The following 6 steps are the same in all versions of Word and will create the email message and send to each recipient.
1) Select Document Type
We will choose “Email Message” but you can use the same steps to create printed letters, Labels, Envelopes... Go to the next Step.
2) Select a Starting Document
If you have a document already open you can use it for the email letter or create a new document from a template. Go to the next Step.
3) Select the recipients
Use an existing list. Click on the “Browse...” feature to find the Excel Customer List file you created above. You may have to change the types of files you are looking for in the “Select the Data Source” window to “Excel Files.” Once you select your Customer List, Word will ask which sheet from the Excel file to use as the “Selected Table.”
Then Word will display all the rows of the recipients in that table.
Go to the next Step.
4) Write your email message
At this point you can write the email letter. This step also allows you to place column information from your Excel data file into any spot within the letter. For instance, to personally address the letter type “Dear:" then click on “More items...” and select “Contact.”
This will display “<<Contact>>” in the document which indicates a merged field location. Go to the next Step.
5) Preview the Email Message
From this step you can now preview what each individual email message will look like and/or select which recipients are to receive it. Go to the next Step.
6) Complete the Merge
Choose “Electronic Mail...” This will display the details of the format of the email message itself.
Type in a Subject Line, select “HTML” for the mail format, then click “OK.”
At this point Word will format each letter, merge in any contents from your Customer List and send each email message to Microsoft Outlook’s Outbox. Best practise when trying this for the first time is to set Microsoft Outlook to Work Offline.
That’s it! You now have a personalized document that is all set to be emailed to all your Customers simply and quickly.
Al Walton is the President and Owner of “The Programmer Guy” based in
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