What's a Mail Merge?
A mail merge is a way to set up a personalized email blast alerting customers of on-goings in your company, or to create a personalized set of documents to individual customers for example, a standard contract laying out terms of service that is filled out with information from your database. In Smart Service you can send a list of fields known as merge fields from your database to Word to use as placeholders for information to fill in automatically when the document is sent. This way the document is personalized for each customer, without having to manually create multiple different documents, or change headings.
Data entry is critical!
Using merge fields in your word document pulls information from Smart Service fields to automatically fill in information based on the field it is pulling from. You will want to ensure you are practicing good data entry, and data entry management while using the system to avoid misspellings, or data being entered into the wrong field, such as a customers billing email address as opposed to the customers service email address.
A mail merge is a convenient way of setting up a Service agreement for your new customers coming into the business or who just had an install, or even sending out an email blast to a select group of people or individuals as you see fit.
Have a flyer that you’ve just created? Well you’re in luck! A Mail merge will take a template that you have created, or found online and use “Merge Fields” to automatically fill in particular information to personalize the document to the individual customer when the email is sent!
Creating a Mail Merge
A mail merge works by taking a list of fields that we send over from Smart Service and inserting those fields into the document to automatically pull information from the referenced category. Such as “«First_Name»” which would pull from the customers first name in your Smart Service database and insert it into our mail merge. Below we will show you how to pull this information from Smart Service into your mail merge. You can manage your marketing campaigns by checking out our Marketing article.
Pulling data from Smart Service
When you’re ready to create a Mail Merge, click on the desired campaign in the Marketing section and go to the “Data for Campaign” tab. This section will show you your entire record list, so before you begin your mail merge be sure to filter down to the information you need.
To filter your data, click the down arrows in the headers to access the filter options. Here you can filter to specific types of records or filter out records missing information. Here’s some helpful filters you should consider using:
- Customer or job: filter down to just one type of record, preferably customers. If you run the merge with the list as is, customers will get the message for their record and one for each job, etc.
- Active: Consider filtering out your inactive customers, depending on why your company inactivates customers. You could also market directly to customers you haven’t seen in a while.
- Addresses: Targeting a specific city? Use the billing or service addresses to select the right areas.
- Email: Filter out records missing emails, or if you’ve been writing “[email protected]” for customers who don’t wish to be emailed, filter out that option.
After your desired filters are applied, head to the “Correspondence” tab to begin the mail merge. If you close the marketing campaign window your filters will reset.
Filter Customers from jobs
Filtering for customers only here is a very important part of this process, if you do not filter for customers only as opposed to customers and jobs, each job with the customers email that is included in the merge will receive a separate email, so some of your customers could receive multiple emails.
Correspondence
When ready, click the “Create a Mail Merge” option in the center of the screen. Word will display a window asking for a template from a previous merge. If you don’t have one, click “cancel” to start a new template. You should see Microsoft Word open on your toolbar, maximize Word to continue.
To access your possible merge fields inside Word, click on the “Mailings” tab and choose the “Insert Merge Field” option. If you’re unsure of whether or not you have the right field, you can click the “Preview Results” option to the right to see what your customer will get.
Continue writing your letter and inserting merge fields as needed. Make sure to occasionally use the “Preview Results” button to make sure your merge is going as planned. If one of your customers is missing information for a merge field, a blank space will be displayed instead of data.
When you’re finished, click the “Finish & Merge” option on the right-hand side of the ribbon. This will display options for executing your mail merge, whether that be emails via Outlook or printing and mailing letters.
Return to the correspondence tab and click “Update customer that correspondence was sent” to add an email correspondence record to the recipients of the mail merge.
Finish and Merge
Once you have filtered your data and created your mail merge it is important to note that the finish and merge option cannot be stopped. Once you have started this process, it is set into motion and will send out to everyone on your recipient list, so ensure you have edited the list to the recipients that you want to receive your mail merge.
Once you have checked to ensure your recipient list looks good you can hit finish & merge and off it goes! Here is a video from Microsoft on using the Mail merge function, which provides a good walkthrough.
Avoid being flagged as spam
Various email providers have set limits on how many emails can be sent out at any given time. You will want to check with your email provider to see what your limit is before going ahead with a merge to avoid potentially having your email flagged as spam.