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Gmail invoice template for Export

Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today, I want to show  you how you can mail merge using Gmail together   with Google Sheets, and this is entirely free. Now  first off, what does mail merge even mean? Well,   with mail merge, you can send out customized bulk  email messages. So just to use a real example, at   the Kevin Cookie Company, I have 50 employees, and  I want to send them all a holiday greeting. Now,   nothing shows you care like sending out customized  emails to each employee. So I could say things   like, hi Nestor, I hope you have a happy holiday.  Now, I could go through and I can manually compose   each one of those emails, but that would take  a long time, and I don't care quite that much.   Instead, I could let the computer do the heavy  lifting for me and let the computer customize all   of those messages on my behalf. Now, another way  to think of it is it's like the electric bill you   get in the mail every single month. Your electric  company is using a very advanced or fancy mail   merge. Today, we're going to see how we could do  that for your own personal or maybe small business   emails. All right, let's jump on the PC and let's  see how can we do this. As a first step, open up   a web browser and head to the following website.  I've also included this link in the description   of this video, so you could simply click on that  to navigate to this site. This website includes   instructions on how you can run a mail merge  using Gmail and Google Sheets. But don't worry,   you don't have to read it. I'll walk you through  step by step of how you can pull this off.   Before we really jump into it though, I do want  to give thanks to Martin Hoxie. He pulled together   this script that allows us to run the mail merge.  Thanks a lot, Martin. If we scroll down about   halfway down the page, we see a Gmail Sheets  mail merge spreadsheet. We're going to use this   spreadsheet to run the mail merge and this has  all of the logic in the script within. Let's click   on this. This opens up a prompt asking if we want  to copy the document over into our Drive account.   Let's click on make a copy. This opens up Google  Sheets and here we see a whole bunch of sample   data populated in the sheet. In a moment, we'll  come through and we'll modify some of this. Before   we do that though, one item I want to call out.  You can place this spreadsheet wherever you want   in your Drive account. If you click up here on the  folder, you can place it in a different location.   Now, right now I'm satisfied leaving it in the  main folder, so I'll leave it there, but you can   move it if you'd like to. Next, let's shift our  attention down to the spreadsheet below. And here   we see a whole bunch of different column headings  and we see some sample data. The way to think of   this is each row within the spreadsheet represents  one email that we are going to send out.   And right now we see a whole bunch of sample data.  For now, I'm going to delete the sample data.   And next we have all of these different column  headings. The way to think of a column heading   is this is a field that you can insert into your  email. So, let's say in my email, I want to say   hi and then the first name. I want to include this  column and I'll pull the name from this column.   Now in my mail merge today, I'm not going to use  all of these different columns. Some of these   are just here as examples. So for instance, in my  mail merge, I don't want to include a last name,   so I'm simply going to delete this column. You  can go through and you could add columns and you   could also delete columns. Here if I right click,  I can also insert additional columns. You can also   go through and change the names of some of these  columns. In my mail merge, I'm not going to have   a discount code, so I'll simply change this  to due date. For this next column, I'm going   to change this to price. So you can go through and  modify the names to represent the different fields   that you want to insert into your email. Now there  are two columns though that please do not modify.   This first one here is the recipient column and  this is for the email address. We're doing a mail   merge, so you need an email address, and the  script specifically looks for this column. So,   make sure you have a column called recipient that  contains all of the different email addresses.   Also, there's another column here at the end  called email sent and this isn't a field that   you're going to use in the email. Instead, when  the mail merge goes through and sends out the   email, if it's successful, you'll see a note here  letting you know that it was successful, and it'll   show you the date and time that the email went  out. So, there are two columns, the recipient   column and the email sent column that you have  to make sure that you leave in place. Now that   we've talked about the column headers, I want to  include just some sample data so we have someone   to send our mail merge to. In today's example, I  want to use the mail merge to send out invoices   for the Kevin Cookie Company. So here in column A,  I'll put down the customer's name. In this case,   it's going to be a test, so I'm going to send this  invoice to me, Kevin. Also next to that, I need to   put down an email address, so I'll put the email  address in the recipient column. Next, I put down   a description, a due date and also the price. Once  again, I'll leave email sent blank because this   is where I'll see the confirmation that the email  went out successfully. Now that we've prepared the   spreadsheet, next, open up your Gmail account  and open up a new message. Now we're going to   start pulling together the email message that'll  take in the different fields from the mail merge.   Up above, we need to indicate who we want to send  this to. And once again, in the sheet, we want   to insert the recipient in the to field. So up  here in the to field, insert two curly brackets.   I'll insert two curly brackets and if we go back  to the spreadsheet, here, I want to insert the   recipient. A best practice is simply go back to  the spreadsheet, copy recipient from here, go back   to your email and then you could paste it in. Then  we're going to close it with two curly brackets.   So, what Gmail will do is it'll go through the  sheet row-by-row and it'll insert the recipient in   here. Next, we could also customize the subject.  For the subject, I can do the exact same thing and   I mentioned that I want to send out an invoice,  so I'm going to start typing in some text.   I've typed in your bill for and now I want to  describe what the bill is for and I want to   insert the description. So here, I'll go back to  the sheet, and I'll copy the description header.   Let me go back to my email and I'll insert  two curly brackets, insert description,   and then close my curly brackets. So here,  it'll insert whatever the description is.   Next, I want to continue typing in my subject.  I now inserted is due on and I want to insert   the due date. So I'll go back to my spreadsheet,  here I'll copy due date and next, I'm going to   insert this in curly brackets and then I'll close  the curly brackets. So now, I'm able to have a   completely customized subject for my email. I went  through and I typed some additional text for my   email bill that I am going to be sending out and  here again, I am also inserting different custom   fields from my spreadsheet. Here for instance,  I'm saying hi and then I insert the first name.   I have some generic text at the beginning  and then here once again, I say your bill for   the description is due on this date and then I  also say submit a payment for this price. So,   I'm using all of these different fields from my  spreadsheet and I'm inserting them into my email.   Now, my email is all good and it's ready to go but  we're not going to do anything with the email yet.   Instead, before we go back to the spreadsheet,  let's take the subject and let's copy this. We're   going to use this in a moment when we kick off the  mail merge because we need to tell the mail merge   which email draft we want to use, and the subject  will help us identify the draft email. So, let's   copy this and then let's go back to Google Sheets.  Back within Google Sheets, we now want to kick   off our mail merge. Our email is all ready to  go. We have a bunch of data in our spreadsheet.   So, to kick it off at the top of Google Sheets,  there's an option now called mail merge. When   we click on that, we see an option to send emails.  Let's click on this. Next, we see a prompt telling   us that it needs authorization. This spreadsheet  has a script associated with it and we have to   give authorization to be able to run this script.  Let's click on continue. Next, this opens up a   sign-in prompt and we have to indicate the account  that we want to use to send out the emails.   I want to use this account, so I'll click on that.  Next, we see a notification that this app isn't   verified. However, this app is provided by Google,  so I think you should be fairly certain that it's   a trustworthy app. Also, in a moment, we'll go  in and we can actually look at the source code   of the script and everything is legit in there.  So, let's click on advanced and down below, we   can continue on with this mail merge. Next, I see  a screen asking me for access and once again, this   is a legit script, so let's go ahead and click on  allow. Now that I've given it authorization, I'm   ready to run my mail merge. Once again, we have to  go up to mail merge on top and let's click on send   emails again. It's now running the script and  it shows a prompt telling us to type in the   subject line of the Gmail draft message that  we would like to mail merge with. Once again,   we copied the subject so you can simply paste that  in here. This helps Google Sheets identify which   email it's going to do the merge with so once you  paste that in, it'll know the exact draft message.   Once you paste it in, let's click on okay. Here  now, the script has finished and here within the   email sent column, I see a confirmation that the  email was successfully sent so I see the date and   the time. Back within my Gmail inbox, I now see  two new messages. First, I see a security alert   just letting me know that I granted access to this  script to run my mail merge. Next, here I see my   custom email that arrived. Let's click into this  to see how it worked. Here within the message,   I can see that the mail merge successfully sent  it to my email address. I could also see that I   was able to successfully customize the subject and  here down below, I could look at the email message   and it inserted all of the different information  from my spreadsheet, so it worked really well and   it was actually pretty easy to pull this off.  Back within Google Sheets, now that I confirm   that the email sent out properly and that all  the fields inserted into the email correctly,   I can go through now and I can add more rows  to my spreadsheet and once I add all of them,   once again, I can go up to mail merge and send  out the emails. Now, it's a very good practice to   just use a sample email first just to ensure that  everything is working properly. Here, you can add   thousands of rows to your spreadsheet and then you  can send out your mail merge. Before we wrap up,   I do want to show some advanced capabilities  of the mail merge and the mail merge is just   a script that's running on this Google Sheet. To  be able to see the script and to use some of the   advanced features, let's go to tools on top  and then let's go down to this option called   script editor. I know it might sound a little bit  scary, but we'll walk through it, and I'll show   you what you can do with this. Within the script  editor, we can see exactly how Martin Hoxie pulled   together this script and all the logic behind the  mail merge. When you authorize the mail merge,   you're really just authorizing that this script  can run and there's nothing malicious within the   script. So once again, it's completely legit  to run this. If we scroll down about halfway,   there's some interesting functionality that we can  take advantage of. Once again, about halfway down,   here's an option for BCC. So let's say you're  sending out your mail merge and you want to BCC   someone, you can remove these forward slashes that  basically indicates that this is a comment and   when you remove it, it's no longer a comment. Here  now, you can type in a BCC email address. Also,   if you want to CC someone, you can remove the  comments or the forward slashes and then you can   insert an email address in here for the CC. If you  have an alias set up, you could also indicate a   from field. You can also put down the name of the  sender. Once again, remove the comments and then   in this field, you could type in the name of the  sender. You could also indicate the reply to email   address or if you don't want to have replies.  Down below, there's also a section that says   attachments and with this mail merge technique,  you can also include attachments. Within Gmail,   when you're composing your message, you can attach  a file here and this file will be attached to any   of the merge messages that you send out. With  this mail merge, you might be wondering, well,   how many emails can I send per day? And there  are some limits in place. With a consumer or   a free account, you can send out emails to up to  100 per day. With a G Suite account, so this is a   paid account, you could increase that limit up to  1,500 per day. So there are some limits in place,   so you can send out 40 or 50,000 emails per  day. But if you're sending out that many emails,   you're probably using a more professional mail  merge solution, but once again, for personal use   or maybe an education environment or a small  business, this mail merge solution works   extremely well and best of all, it doesn't cost  anything. All right, well, that's how you can use   mail merge using Gmail and Google Sheets. If you  now know how to mail merge, please give this video   a thumbs up. To see more videos like this,  hit that subscribe button, and if you want   to see me cover any other topics, leave a  note down below in the comments. All right,   well, that's all I had for you today. I hope you  enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.