How to Create an Email Group in Outlook (Step-by-Step Guide)

As someone who knows the deep nuances of emailing I get asked a lot about how to create an email group in Outlook.

After all, creating an Outlook email group is quite useful if you find yourself sending emails regularly to the same group of people.

And with Outlook groups, you won’t have to manually add member email addresses each time you type out group emails anymore.

But how do you go about making one?

In this article, I’ll go over what an Outlook group is and how to create an email distribution group. I’ll also show you how to edit these groups and send emails to them.

And, since this is a very common request here at GMass, I’ll also show you how you can easily transcend what you can do with groups — and send personalized mail merge messages to your contacts using your Outlook email address.

Further reading

Want to learn how to create email groups in Gmail? Read my in-depth guide on it.

Also, find out how to use the BCC field in Outlook and Gmail.

How to Create an Email Group in Outlook: Table of Contents

How to Create a Group in Outlook
How to Send an Email to a Contact Group in Outlook
How to Edit a Contact List in Outlook
Outlook Basics

Let’s get started!

How to Create a Group in Outlook

The process of setting up an Outlook contact list varies slightly depending on whether you use Windows, Mac, or the Outlook online app.

Let’s take a look at how to set up a distribution group on each platform:

How to create Outlook groups for Windows

Here’s how you can easily create a distribution list in Outlook on Windows:

Step 1

To create a new group, first open Outlook. Then, go to the navigation pane and click on the People icon (the small icon to the bottom left of your screen).

Alternatively, you can also select New Items > More Items > Contact Group from the Home tab.

Step 2

Under My Contacts, select the folder in which you want to save the contact group. Most people tend to save the new contact group in the contacts folder.

Note: For this article, I obtained several sample contacts from this website.

Step 3

Select New Contact Group by clicking the new contact group button from the Home tab in the top ribbon.

Step 4

Set a group name for your contact group in the name field.

Step 5

Click add members and choose to add member emails “From Address Book,” “From Outlook Contacts,” or “make a new contact.”

Here’s what each of these means:

From Address Book – This usually contains the email IDs of every person in your Outlook address book (often everyone in your organization).
Outlook Contact List – This contains primarily a set of external contacts that you’ve stored in your Microsoft Outlook contacts folder.
Make a New Contact – This enables you to create a new contact to add to the list.

If the list of contact emails only contains a group of people from your company, you can also add multiple people through your firm’s global address list. (A global address list is an electronic address book that contains the contact information of everyone in an organization.)

Note: If you need to add member emails again to your list of business or personal contacts, just select the list and click Add members to repeat the process.

Step 6

Once you’ve grabbed everyone from the select members dialog box and finished setting up your group, click Save & Close, and the Members box will disappear.

Once you click Save, you can test your group by sending a message to your group contact list.

Note: If you want to add an Outlook distribution list to a folder of contacts on Outlook, you can do so using the folder pane. Likewise, if you want to edit your group emails or other settings, you can do so using the folder pane as well.

Back to contents

Now that I’ve covered how to create a list of contact emails for the Outlook application on Windows let’s look at the distribution list process for Mac systems.