How to perform a E-Mail Merge to create personalized emails

Mail Merging of data for email delivery is an extremely valuable tool in today's competitive environment and Intellect makes it fun and worry free to use. From promotional mailings to customer receipts and shipping documents nothing could be easier. It is a valuable tool ideally suited to handle mailings from 1 to 2,000 mail addressees.

Please understand and let us clearly set your expectations that this is NOT the tool to handle very large mailing lists - you will need specialized server based tools to properly deal with those higher volumes. But for the types of mailings most of us would send, using the power of Intellect's contact management and our email merging means you can do your mailings on your own from your pc and save a bundle by avoiding those expensive online mail services such as Constant Contact.

In case you prefer an visual show instead of text documentation only, here is a video version of this guide from our Chaos University video series. (The text version continues below.)

Step 1 - Select recipients for your message's To Field.

To send to a group of contacts all at once with merged personalized messages, use the contact screen to highlight the people you wish to mail. Use Groups or Categories for filtering, too, if that helps you narrow down who you want to send to. Then go to the New button at the top, click on the drop down arrow on the right side and choose E-mail message. This will create a new email with the To: field filled out with the mailto: addresses for the selected contacts.

If you are only sending to one or a few people, it is also perfectly fine to manually type in e-mail address in the To field of a new message.

Please keep in mind that mail merge only works if the addressee is found in your address book!

Step 2 - Insert merge fields.

Click the button on the message toolbar to open the Insert Sidebar. On the right side of the screen, choose the tab for Merge Fields. Double click on any of the listed fields you wish to use to place variables from your address book in the spots where you want to merge names, addresses, and other data.

Here is an example of what this might look like:  (All of the « and » characters mark where the insert field has been used)

Special tip: If you create message content that you want to reuse for the future, you can highlight the lines and paragraphs you wish to reuse, then right click and choose Copy Selection to Snippet from the popup menu. You can save this text you've created, including the merge fields, under whatever name will remind you what this content is. If you look on the Snippets tab of the Insert Sidebar instead of the Merge Fields tab, you can see and use any of your previously saved snippets in a new message without needing to recreate the template from scratch.

Step 3 - Click the Merge Button on the toolbar.

The merge will combine the contacts referenced in the To field with the template you just created. Each addressee that you included in the To field will get their own customized letter. All of the letters will be placed for you into the Mailmerge Results folder so that you can review them prior to actually sending them out .

Step 4 - Mail Them. Highlight some or all of the messages you are ready to deliver and hit the "Send..." button. You get to specify the day and time to send all these messages out. Please note: the default is tomorrow, so if you want them sent out today, be sure to change the date. If you want them to go right away, choose a time from earlier today, then hit the Send & Receive button to check for mail immediately.

Tips:

• Regardless of the number of e-mail addresses that you have added to the To Field, the recipients will not be able to see each others names.
• It's ok to experiment with merging because the results are not sent until you are ready. This way you can preview each message exactly as your customer or friends will see them. Potentially embarrassing things such as Dear Mr. LASTNAME can be avoided. You can delete messages from the Mailmerge Results folder if you see a problem you wish to correct and you don't want to send these as they are.
• Keep your original merge templates in your snippets so that you can use them again.
• Remember this is not a tool for creating or sending mail to tens of thousands of people . You need specialized tools for managing group mailings and group mailing lists management for those types of volume.

This help article applies to Intellect 4 or newer