About
formMule is an add-on for Google Sheets that allows you to easily and quickly send mail merges. Mail merging makes emailing many recipients easier by utilizing tags, which takes data from a spreadsheet and uses that to organize and send personalized emails to multiple recipients.
formMule sends targeted, personalized emails from a Google Sheet. Run as either a manual email merge or -- more powerfully -- as a triggered merge that runs automatically on form submit or on a timer.
A great way to use formMule is when you are gathering responses in a Google Form, and later on, you want to email everyone who signed up using your form. formMule makes it easy to create a spreadsheet from the responses. Make sure to collect their email addresses.
Often times, mail merging can seem like a daunting task depending on the program you are using, but formMule makes it much easier since it is so well integrated into GSuite.
Environment
Google Gmail and Sheets
Steps
Please view this tutorial on using formMule before getting started. Video adapted from npsne.org.
To get started with formMule, you will have to download the add-on from the formMule Google Web Store Page. Select the Free button to get started with the download and installation.
- Once downloaded, navigate to the spreadsheet in Google Sheets that you will be mail merging. In the menu bar at the top, select the Add-ons drop down menu and you will find formMule. Select formMule -> Launch.
- Next, you will have to specify the specific sheet that your data is placed. Google Sheets by default names this "Sheet 1" but this may be different depending on whatever it is named. Once you are done specifying your sheet and triggers, select Next: Templates and send conditions.
- This screen will allow you to set the number of email templates you would like and the send conditions that you can apply. Sending different templates can be used for different reasons, even depending on the values in your sheet. The Send Condition field is used to set a specific flag that must exist in a column in the source data in order for a particular template to send. Once you are done specifying templates and send conditions, select Next: Edit templates to proceed.
- Here is where you will be able to create your emails. At the top, you can select the email template if you created more than one email template. In the field labeled: To, CC, and BCC fields, you can enter the tag of the column you used to list the emails. In this example, the label of the emails column was named Email. Therefore the tag for emails is <<Email>>. The same concept applies to all the other tags. Enter in a subject and proceed to the body of the email. In the body, you can write your emails as normal, using tags that will read the data from its respective data in the spreadsheet. Note that you can either type in an email either manually or using the automatically generated tags on the right side of the screen shown in the picture below. You can also use a tag to display the current date in the email. Once you are done created your emails, you can select Preview and Send all. This will not send the merges just yet, but will instead give you the opportunity to scroll through and verify that the mail merge is done correctly.
- Here is the preview screen. This will display each email being sent for email template email which can help you verify that the mail merge is done correctly. You can scroll down the entire list. If you happen to notice an error, you can select the Edit template(s) button will bring you back to the email editor where you can make the appropriate changes. If your mail merge is ready to go, you can simply select Send now. This will proceed to send each email.
- To further confirm that the mail merge was successfully sent, or if it did not due to some error, you can always check your spreadsheet, which will have generated a new column displaying the send status of each email. This will show the time and date that the email was sent.
