2. Creating and sending your first MailMerge365 campaign

In this tutorial we will create, write and send your first campaign with MailMerge365. You need to have signed-up for MailMerge365 and installed the plugin in order to continue.

Step 1: Preparing your campaign data

MailMerge365 uses a spreadsheet (Excel or CSV file) to know who to send your email campaign to.

The minimum required for this spreadsheet is a column of email addresses. You can name this column either "email" or "to". A spreadsheet can only have one column with "email" or "to" in the first cell. 

Note: 

• If you want to send to multiple senders, you can add multiple email addresses separated by a semi-colon up. All email addresses (including semi-colons) cannot exceed 200 characters.
• You can add CC or BCC columns to the spreadsheet and they will be added to each generated email. Please see here for some limitations on these feature regarding tracking.

We recommend adding more columns with personal information that you can use in your email. This will make your email feel more personal and increase the likelihood of getting a response. For example you can add name, company and a personal note about what you remember from meeting them.

As a starting point you can download this sample Excel file here. Open the file in Excel and change the email addresses to email addresses you're using for testing purposes. Note that you can not add the same email address twice in one spreadsheet. You can use temporary email addresses to test with.

Step 2: Select the account/mailbox to send from

Open Outlook and create a new message window. 

If you only have a single account/mailbox in your Outlook the message compose will not show you the "From" dropdown and you can skip to the next step.

If you are using multiple accounts/mailboxes in Outlook, open the "From" dropdown and select the account you have installed MailMerge365 for. 

Note there may be two different types of entries: 

1. The top part (labeled "1" in the above picture ) are full mailboxes you have linked to your Outlook and that can be used for MailMerge365. You can select any of these to use for MailMerge365. If you select one and the "MailMerge365 Campaign" menu item (see next step) disappears (or doesn't appear) then please follow the installation instructions to install the plugin for that particular account.
2. The bottom part (labeled "2" in the above picture with a little X on the side) are only "Send-As" permissions. These are not supported in MailMerge365, see here.

Step 3: Start the plugin

Then you can start the MailMerge365 plugin. This step depends on the version of Outlook you are using:

New Outlook on the Desktop and on the Web (Simplified Ribbon)	Classic Outlook on the Desktop and Classic Ribbon	Classic Outlook on the Web
The installed plugins are in the submenu on the right hand side. Open the menu and click on the MailMerge365 icon to start the plugin.	Open the tab "Message" and the plugin icon is located at the top of the window. If you have many plugins installed the position might be different. Click on the MailMerge365 icon to start the plugin.	The installed plugins are located at the bottom right of the window. Click on the MailMerge365 icon to start the plugin.

Step 4: Start your campaign

MailMerge365 lives in a sidebar of the compose window and will look the same on all versions of Outlook.

Continue by click the " Upload your campaign data file" button, select the Excel or CSV file you created in Step 1 from the file browser that pops up and then click "Open".

Wait for your file to be processed and you'll be greeted with a blue welcome banned which you can dismiss by pressing OK. Then you'll see the different campaign settings.

You will also see that an email address has been added to the "to" field of your email. This is a unique email address for the campaign you just created. Don't remove it.

Step 5: Compose and personalize your email

For this tutorial we will create a simple campaign. First add the text "Test Campaign" as your subject line.

Then copy and paste the following text into the body of your email:

Hi X,

I enjoyed meeting you at the conference. I think it would be good to continue our conversation on X.

Did I note down your company name correctly? X

Would you like to jump on a call? I'm using a tool that shows you where I'm free, please go ahead and choose any time that suits you.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Now we are going to replace the Xs with tokens from your spreadsheet. Begin by selecting the X on the first line. Then in the MailMerge365 window use the drop-down under "Add personalization field to email" to select "firstname" and press add.

You will notice the X has been replaced by {{firstname}} - a token. A token is always the name of the column surrounded by two brackets on each side. When you send your campaign MailMerge365 will replace this token with the specific information for that email address from the spreadsheet.

Now go ahead and repeat the process for the other Xs.

• The second X after "our conversation on" can be replaced with "note".
• The third X after "correctly?" can be replaced with "company".
• We won't use "last name" for this tutorial.
• Next select the text "Choose any time that suits you" and add a link to any website, e.g. your company website. Make sure the URL is not part of the email body text.
• Finally just add your name to the end of the email.

You can adapt the email body any way you like and you can type the token manually if you want to. The format we've used here feels quite personal to the recipient, therefore a similar style is recommended.

When you finish your email should look something like this:

In the plugin window underneath the personalization drop-down you can click "Preview Email". This will open a window and let you test what the final email will look like for each recipient. Notice how each token has been replaced with the information from your file.

Step 6: Send the email