Is it possible to do an email merge with a personalized email address in the To field and one or more RELATED email addresses in the CC or BCC fields. In this post we look at why and how you can achieve this with Microsoft Outlook?
Why?
This is very useful when you need to send a copy of the same email to two or more people in the same company.
For example:
- You may want to send reminders for a particular event to attendees but all CC their assistants.
- You may send copies of statements to your clients and CC a copy to their accounts manager.
- If you are running a newsletter for a school, you want to send an email to one parent and CC the other parent on it too.
In all these examples the To and CC field are related to each other i.e. there could be a different CC email address for each person you are emailing.
Before I show you how to do this in Outlook, you may be wondering…
Why not just send each person a separate copy of the same email?
The main reasons for this is that you want all recipients to be aware that the others have also received the email. They can now also do Reply-to-All on the email your sent to start a conversation if they need to.
Setup Your List
The first thing you need to do is to setup a list which contains the email address you want to use in the To field and also the email address(es) for the CC field.
For this example, I am assuming that your list is in Microsoft Excel similar to the one that I have shown below:
Note:
- The To field (in this case the Customer Name) can only contain ONE email address.
- The CC field can contain multiple email addresses separated by comas or semi-colons as shown for Jane Doe above.
Merge and Send the Emails
Now it’s time to send out the emails. While there is no built-in way in Outlook to do this, you can easily do this if you are using the Outlook add-in Email Merge Pro for Outlook.
Start Outlook
Click the Email Merge Wizard button. The Wizard will guide you to creating your email and to choosing the Excel file as your data source.
When you come to the following screen, click the Select field’s hyperlink.
Click CC/BCC and then select the field that your CC
email address
Click OK to return to the Wizard.
Follow the rests of the steps of the Wizard to send out the email.
Email Merge will create a separate email for each person, with the correct file attached to each one.
Our customers have used Email Merge to increase sales and to provide better support to their customers. Please share your own ideas in the comments below.
Related articles:
You can use this with our earlier article on setup your spreadsheet to email merge a different attachment to each person in Outlook.
