The GMass Startup Guide for Mail Merge

Everything you need to know to easily send personalized correspondence at scale, from mass emails to small groups 

 

Once you start sending personalized emails at scale using mail merge, you’ll never go back.

Whether you’re sending mass emails, internal comms, or small group correspondence… a recruiter talking to candidates… you need to keep in touch with the members of your club or church… you’re a nonprofit reaching out to donors… you’re a teacher sending out grades or assignments… or even if you’re getting married and sending out save-the-dates…

Mail merge is a godsend in terms of speed and ease.

Especially mail merge in GMass.

Here’s your guide to using GMass as your mail merge platform.

GMass Startup Guide for Mail Merge: Table of Contents

• The Basics of GMass
• Mail Merge in GMass
• More GMass Mail Merge Features
• Other GMass Features Popular for Mail Merge Senders
• After the Campaign
• Get Help with GMass
• What Else Can GMass Do For You?

The Basics of GMass

How mail merge works in GMass

GMass works inside Gmail, and you’ll use a connected Google Sheet of contacts for mail merge.

You’ll prep a Google Sheet with your contacts, including a column with their email addresses and then columns for every other bit of info you want to incorporate about them. This can even be a Google Sheet you’re already using to manage your contacts.

Then you connect your Google Sheet to a new GMass email campaign and every column header becomes a merge tag you can use.

Click the red GMass button when you’re ready to send, and each contact gets their own personalized message (with no evidence that you’ve used mail merge or that you’ve also sent the message to other people).

Quickstart Guide

When you’re getting started with GMass, we always suggest checking out the GMass quickstart guide.

It will walk you through setting up the GMass Chrome extension and connecting your Gmail or Google Workspace account.

And from there, it will show you step-by-step how to create an email campaign by connecting your Google Sheet of contacts and how to use mail merge.

More basics?

If you want to get to know GMass even better, learn about how the settings box works for controlling your campaigns.

And you can also read up on the dashboard, which is the area where you can control account-wide settings.

Mail Merge in GMass

Here’s everything you need to know about mail merge in GMass.

Google Sheets mail merge

As I mentioned before, GMass uses Google Sheets for mail merge.

Every row in your sheet is a contact and every column is a detail about that contact you can merge into your email.

Mail merging contact details

The most common use of mail merge personalization is bringing in each contact’s unique details which they’ll receive.

Things like first name, last name, business name, and industry are common.

But you can do way more than that…

Personalized paragraphs

Why stop at merely inserting people’s basic details into an email?

With GMass you can also personalize sentences, entire paragraphs — or even entire messages.

Personalized links

Send every contact a unique URL with mail merge personalized links — everything from personal dashboard logins to targeted web content.

Personalized images

You can use mail merge to send a personalized image to everyone in your Google Sheet.

Fallback values

What happens if you don’t have a particular bit of information for some of your contacts? (For instance, you don’t know some of your contacts’ first names?)

That’s where you use fallback values. For instance, in a case where you didn’t know someone’s name and that cell is blank in their row in Google Sheets, your email could automatically say “Hello there!” instead of “Hello Steve!” or “Hello Jenny!”

More GMass Mail Merge Features

To channel my best infomercial host: But that’s not all! Believe it or not, we’re just getting started with all you can do in GMass with mail merge.

Using personalization in auto follow-ups

You can continue using your mail merge tags in your automated follow-up messages.

Type your auto follow-ups right into the GMass settings box and you can use all the same mail merge tags as you’re using in your initial campaign email.

Personalized CC and BCC

You can customize who’s CCed and/or BCCed on each message in your campaign using mail merge.

Personalized To: headers

Take your mail merging to the next level by personalizing the name in the To: field of each email. (This can even potentially be a little deliverability booster!)

Conditional content

With GMass’s conditional content, you can use if… then… else notation to really hyper-personalize your emails.

Automatic first name detection

Don’t have every contact’s first name handy for mail merge? GMass has auto first name detection, where our algorithm figures out contacts’ first names based on their email addresses wherever possible.

Testing your mail merge and sequences

When you’re sending a campaign with lots of mail merges (and especially things like conditional content or other high-level mail merge), you want to make sure everything’s populating correctly before you send.

With GMass you can test your campaign message or even your entire sequence of auto follow-ups to make sure everything’s merging right.

Personalizing from sources other than a Google Sheet

By far the most common method for mail merge in GMass is via a Google Sheet. However, that’s not the only option.

You can also merge in data from Google Contacts. Or, with the auto first-name detection we mentioned above, you can simply put addresses into Gmail’s To: field and GMass will do its work.

Mail merge when you connect multiple Google Sheets

You can connect more than one Google Sheet of contacts to a single campaign in GMass. And when you do, you can still use mail merge — even if your Google Sheets have different column headers. (For instance, one sheet has a FirstName column and another has a FName column.)

Other GMass Features Popular for Mail Merge Senders

That’s a full rundown of GMass’s mail merge features.

But GMass does a whole lot more. Here are some of the other great problem-solving features that our mail merge users love.

Recurring campaigns

You can set up an automated recurring campaign with a few clicks in GMass. Now every time you add a new contact to your Google Sheet, they’ll automatically get that campaign.

(And yes, you can use all the mail merge features we’ve discussed with recurring campaigns.)

Recurring campaigns are also great for your existing list of contacts — for instance, you could automatically send a message to everyone on their birthday, or their anniversary of joining your organization.

Break Gmail’s sending limits

Do you have a particularly large list or have mass emails to send out?

GMass offers a variety of ways you can break right through Gmail’s daily sending limits.

The easiest way? Use our special sending servers. We have one for people sending opt-in email and another for people doing cold outreach.

Spam Solver

You want your messages to go to the inbox, not the spam folder.

While your reputation plays the largest role, GMass has a great suite of deliverability tools to help you improve and solidify your inbox rate.

We always recommend using Spam Solver before you send your campaign. Spam Solver tests your campaign by sending it to real inboxes, then seeing your inbox, spam, and promotions rate. From there, it gives you recommendations to improve.

Other deliverability tools

GMass has a number of other deliverability tools to help you get to the inbox. (On top of our fundamental advantage of sending through Gmail’s API, which few others have permission to do.)

You can set up a custom tracking domain in GMass (with SSL) so no one else’s reputation has the potential to drag you down.

Since we’re inside Gmail, you can embed images rather than linking to them on an external server.

We offer free email verification to help you reduce your bounces.

And if you’re having trouble getting emails delivered to a particular domain or around particular security software, you can circumvent that using our delivery routes.

Scheduling

GMass has all the scheduling features you’d expect — plus some you might not, like the ability to skip sending on certain days or holidays.

After the Campaign

You’ve sent your mail merge campaign. What’s next?

Analytics

GMass gives you a full report on every campaign (opens, clicks, replies, bounces, unsubscribes, and more).

Your report includes the most accurate open rates of any platform out there.

The Reply Project

The Reply Project is GMass’s special email response tool. It opens all the replies to your campaign on one screen so you can respond to them in record time. (You can even use templates or ChatGPT.)

Send a behavior-based follow-up campaign

GMass makes it simple to send new campaigns to a group of recipients from a prior campaign — for instance, everyone who didn’t open your campaign. Or everyone who opened but didn’t click.

You can even continue to use your same mail merge tags in your behavior-based follow-up campaign.

Get Help with GMass

Need help getting started with GMass or along the way?

Here’s where you should look.

Support FAQ

Our support FAQ isn’t just a throwaway like you see elsewhere. We really do include (and regularly add) the most common questions we hear.

Searching the GMass blog

At some point we’ve written an in-depth guide to every single GMass feature and every problem GMass solves.

We use an integrated Google search box with the blog. Type in your question at the top of the GMass blog homepage — seriously, just type your full question — and it should surface the right blog post with an answer.

AI assistant

We have our own custom AI assistant here to help you with your GMass questions.

Join our Facebook group

We run a massive community of GMass users over at Facebook. Ask your question there and you should get crowdsourced help quickly. (We also monitor the group closely, so we will chime in too as needed.)

Contact support

If none of the above methods work, you can reach out to our support team. They’ll dig into your problem and figure out how to help you.

Request a feature

Using GMass and realize it can’t do something you want it to do? Let us know using our support form (choose “Feature suggestion”). While there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to build your feature, we’re always looking to improve.

What Else Can GMass Do For You?

GMass’s mail merge features — whether for mass emails or smaller groups — brought you here.

However, there’s so much more GMass can do. In fact, once you get to know us, you’ll realize you can use GMass to send every type of email that comes up.

Cold outreach

Need to send cold outreach campaigns? GMass was one of the pioneers in the cold email world and continues to make it easier than anyone else to send your outreach campaigns.

Email marketing

Doing email marketing? You can send everything from newsletters to product announcements to transactional emails with GMass — all without paying a fortune once your list reaches a certain size.

Email tracking and more

And you can even start sending every email through GMass, even your one-on-one messages. (Just hit the red GMass button in the Gmail compose window rather than the blue send button.) That will bring the power of tracking, scheduling, automated follow-ups, and more to every single message you send.