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Mail Merge Your Newsletter

Written by: Donald F. Pooley

Article Overview: In the last issue I told you how to send out your ezine to a few subscribers by copying an Excel list of them into the 'Bcc:' (Blind Carbon Copy) slot.

Mail Merge Your Newsletter

In the last issue I told you how to send out your ezine to a few subscribers by copying an Excel list of them into the 'Bcc:' (Blind Carbon Copy) slot.
The downsides to this method are:
1. You have no email record of who it went to, and
2. You can't personalize (e.g. Dear Harry) each message.
I got around these shortcomings by using MS Word's 'Merge' feature at: Tools/Letters and Mailings/Mail Merge Wizard.
First: write your newsletter in Word. If you plan to email it as text (like TIP) set its font (in the 3 top left slots) to "Plain Text---Courier New---10".
Next: End every line at 5" on your Word's top ruler.
Now click 'Tools' in the top menu, followed by 'Letters and Mailings', then 'Mail Merge Wizard', and follow directions.
To personalize your emails you'll need a second column in the Excel spreadsheet for "First Name" next to "Email". The 'Mail Merge Wizard' will tell you when to load it.
Test it first by sending it to your or your family's list of email addresses and names.
The two minor downsides I found with this method are:
1. Every email appears in your 'Sent Items' folder, which is good in that it confirms that they were sent, but it fills up this folder if you have a lot of emails; and
2. It stops at some names, and doesn't send them.
But there's another solution as you'll see in the next TIP.

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