At the time being, you might want to create meeting invitation emails to your teammates. Or, you might want to send a personalized happy new year greeting to your clients? There are lots of ways to send personalized emails. If you use Outlook on your daily basis, you can use the mail merge feature to send mass personalized emails.

Outlook itself can’t stand alone. When using the mail merge feature of Outlook to create mass personalized emails, you will be directed to a new Microsoft Word window to create the email body. Technically, Outlook only provides the contacts, while the email content is created with Microsoft Word. Both Outlook and MS Word themselves are part of the Microsoft Office package. You will have these two apps when installing Microsoft Office.

Before getting started, make sure you already have the contacts of the recipients you want to send the emails to. Also, make sure that each contact data contains the email address of the recipient.

To get started, launch Outlook and click the people icon on the bottom side to open your Outlook contacts.

Select the contacts you want to send the emails to. To do so, you can press and hold the CTRL key on your keyboard, while selecting the contacts. If you have your contacts well-organized, it would be helpful. You can, for instance, filter the contacts by category.

Once done selecting the contacts, you can click Mail Merge on the toolbar.

A popup will appear as you click Mail Merge. You can either create a new document or use an existing document instead. If you want to create a new document, select New document on the Document file section. On the Contacts section, select Only selected contacts to send the emails to the contacts you have specified above. On the Merge options section, set the Merge to option to Email and write the email subject on the available field. Click OK to continue.

A new MS Word window will appear as you click the OK button on the popup above. The first step you need to do in the MS Word window is to add the greeting section. Click Greeting Line on the toolbar to add one.

On the greeting line popup dialog, you can set the prefix. There are only two words available, though: “dear” and “to”.

If you want to use a different prefix, such as “Hi,” “Hello,”, or “How are you?, “, you can write your preferred prefix first before clicking Greeting Line. Then, click Greeting Line and set the greeting line format to none.

You can also add additional pieces of information to the greeting line. To do so, simply put your cursor to the part you want to add the information to and click Insert Merge Field (next to Greeting Line). This will display the list of the details of Contacts information in Microsoft Outlook. If you want to add a new piece of information, make sure that the field you want to add is filled out on your contact. For instance, if you want to add the job title, you should make sure that all contacts you selected have the Job Title field filled out. The format below will display the name, job title, and the company of the recipients.

You can preview the greeting line by clicking Preview Results on the toolbar.

Once done with the greeting line, you can start writing the email content. Simply write the email content just like usual. Once done, click Finish & Merge and select Send Email Messages.

A popup will appear afterward. Simply click the OK button. There is nothing that needs to be changed here unless you want to send your email in a different format other than HTML.