What you need to know
- Google has announced a new way to make bulk emails look more professional in Gmail for Workspace customers.
- The new feature allows you to personalize multi-send emails using merge tags.
- It is rolling out to Google Workspace customers over the coming weeks.
Google is clearly making Gmail more friendly for sending bulk emails, what with a recent addition of a multi-send feature to the service. It's now adding another capability that should make emails for a large audience look more personalized.
The search giant announced via its Workspace blog that Gmail is picking up support for merge mail tags. The new feature builds upon the recently unveiled multi-send feature, allowing you to personalize bulk emails by adding any of the following tags: @firstname, @lastname, @fullname, and @email.
This is available only to customers on the Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Workspace Individual tiers.
"You can use mail merge tags to send more personalized and engaging emails to large audiences from web Gmail," Google notes.
Google vows to add support for spreadsheet-based mail merge tags in the future. Currently, recipients will see the first and last names in your email based on what you created in Google Contacts. For recipients not in your contacts, Gmail will attempt to "infer the first name and last name based on how the name is formatted." This means that the best way to ensure recipients view the correct names is to add recipients first to Contacts.
To get started, you can simply insert mail merge tags by typing "@" after adding recipients to your email draft. It should be noted that you must manually turn on the multi-send mode using the button in the Compose toolbar.
The feature is rolling out over the next several weeks beginning this week for Rapid Release domains. On the other hand, Scheduled Release domains will start seeing this capability from November 7.
