How to Send a Personalized Letter or E-mail to a Mailing List

If you want to send a personalized letter or e-mail to a list of people, you can do this with your MS Office program. The easiest way to begin is by personalizing the salutation, so instead of "Dear Sir:", your letter actually has the person's name in it. Once you have successfully done this, you can get more creative!

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• A computer with a recent version of MS OFFICE, with WORD.
• MS Outlook (for the e-mail section)
• Patience

1. To do a mail merge, you need to have a list of names. An Excel list or a contact list in your Outlook program work best.
   For this example, we will assume you have some names in your contact list in Outlook, and they are all accurately entered with proper first and last names.
   We will not be doing fancy filtering for now, just use all the names.
2. Turn on your PC and open your WORD program to a blank page.
   Type your letter as you normally would, and leave a blank line where you would normally type the salutation (you do not need to type this - the merge will do this for you.)
   Save the letter and give it a name. The letter should still be open.
3. The mail merge wizard is a step by step process to help you create your letters. From the TOOLS menu, choose LETTERS & MAILINGS, then click MAIL MERGE.
   You should see the "wizard" which will walk you through each step.
4. Walk through each step and answer the questions as indicated. Go through the Wizard and answer each step as follows;
   
   For Document Type, choose LETTERS
   
   For Starting Document, choose USE THE CURRENT DOCUMENT
   
   For Select Recipients, choose SELECT FROM OUTLOOK CONTACTS, click CHOOSE CONTACTS FOLDER, highlight your contacts list and click OK. When the list comes up, click OK.
   
   The final step is WRITE YOUR LETTER. You have done this, so on to the next step.
5. The GREETINGS LINE will insert the formatted personalized greeting for you. Click your mouse in the blank line where you want the "Dear____ " to appear in your letter.
   
   You should see some option links in the wizard. Choose GREETING LINE, and pick the format you want to have - some are formal and some are more casual.
6. Click "Preview Your Letters" to see how they will look.
   if you need to change anything you can go to a previous step in the process.
7. The final result Now you can print your personalized letters and each recipient will see their own name in the greeting.

Tips & Warnings

• start simple and work up to more complex personalization; you can insert any field from the contact record anywhere in the letter, provided it is a consistent format and use with all your recipients. Example: if you have a spouse name in each record, you can include a sentence that uses their name. (Be sure to preview all letters to avoid mistakes).
• Try a simple example first - your software might vary slightly depending on the version, so if the wizard is not exactly as described, look around for the same options and try that.