If you’d rather just use Gmail to send mass emails, mail merge style, GMass is for you.
What Is GMass?
GMass is a Chrome extension and is currently free to use. All it does is lets you create very basic mail merge style emails right within Gmail. The customization is currently just limited to first name and last name, but hopefully we’ll see more attributes soon. GMass makes the email look it was crafted personally for individual recipients. Limitation with GMass: Because GMass is basically sending individual emails using Gmail, it’s limited by Gmail’s guidelines which say that you can only send 500 emails/day on a personal account and 2000 emails/day on a Google Apps account.
How to Use GMass
To get started, first download the Chrome extension and go to Gmail website. Click the Compose button. If you spot a GMass icon in the button, it means the extension is installed and ready to go. The first time you open Gmail after installing GMass, you’ll be prompted to activate GMass. Just select your current Gmail account and you’ll be on your way. Before you get started, you’ll need to add every email address you want to send emails to, to your contacts. Make sure you add the first name and last name. This is what GMass will use to customize the email. If you don’t do this, the title will basically be empty. Once you’ve got the contacts ready, just start putting them in the To section one after the other. Now we get to actually crafting the email. Write the email you want. But keep the places for first name and last name empty. Instead, type in {FirstName} and {LastName}. This will automatically put in the first name and the last name of the person you’re sending the individual email to. Mail merge with MailChimp: Check out an easy way to create mail merge emails using Google Docs and MailChimp plugin.
GMass Options
Now you can just click the GMass button and it will start creating individual emails based on the parameters and will start sending them. But there are couple of options you should know about. Click the little up-arrow button. Here you’ll see options for scheduling the emails for later, saving them as drafts instead of sending them out and to enable/disable tracking. One really interesting option here is to send the email as a reply instead of a new message. If you’ve already had a conversation with the recipients, the email will be sent as a reply. This means it will show up in a thread and will look like it was personally crafted (while it really wasn’t).
What Will You Use it for?
I can see small businesses getting a lot out of GMass. What will you use it for? Share with us in the comments below. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
