How I send customized emails on a small budget.

I found a great tool

I want to share a tool that I use when communicating with my students to send customized emails to them. I am not an affiliate. I only want to share in case it is useful to someone else.

Prior to this, I was concerned that my emails, sent from free services like Mailchimp, were ending up in my students' spam folder. I already had a small list and didn't want to lose out on reaching them because of this. I also wanted to be able to send personalized emails to them, call them by their first name and mention specific topics that we might have spoken of.

I felt like I scored it big with this tool because I spent a small amount of money (a one time payment), avoided monthly fees and got features like scheduling, custom attachments, emails sent from my personal email address and best of all *guaranteed delivery ( I say guaranteed with an asterisk because I feel I was able to avoid my mail being tagged as a marketing email; being as a result of using a marketing platform, thus leading to higher possibilities of it going to spam).

So what is it?

It's a Google Sheets add-on, MailMerge for Gmail created by Amit Agarwal. At the time(2016), I installed it via Chrome from this link https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mail-merge-with-attachmen/nifmcbjailaccmombpjjpijjbfoicppp. I used the free version for a while but it limited me to sending 50 emails a day and did not provide open rates or link clicks data. I eventually paid maybe $39 to get it upgraded and got up to 250 emails a day with open rates and link clicks stats.

Looking back at it today I notice some changes

1. You can get it as a Google add-on at this link https://digitalinspiration.com/product/gmail-mail-merge and it is compatible with all browsers not just Chrome.
2. There is now a yearly license of $29.00 (no more one time payment)
3. Multi-user and domain user licenses

Who is it for?

It may be suitable for people who are just starting out with a small budget and have a small list of about 250 - 1500 persons. If this is you and you want customized emails for your customers you can give it a look.

Why I like it

• It uses my own gmail account to send mail increasing the chances of it legitimately going through to my students' inbox. I believe it's like me sitting at my inbox and clicking send. I have my business address linked in my gmail account so it goes out with my business address.

• I can customize the emails sent to different students depending on what they need using variables. Variables can be any information that you put in the Google sheet. I send different links to different groups of students from one campaign

• I can track email opens and clicks similarly like I did with Mailchimp

• It's a low price for all these features

Why I don't like it

• I am limited to 250 emails per day when I need to get pass this I schedule the rest to go out the following day. This limit is imposed by Gmail based on the type of account I have. You can get anywhere between 250 - 1500 based on your gmail account type.

• Manually managing a list of emails in an excel sheet is bit of a task to keep it synced with the one on mailchimp.

• If there are errors it can take a little effort to resolve, not that errors are common. I think I had 2 in the full year and two months that I've been using it.

Conclusion

MailMerge for Gmail is a powerful tool that can be used if you only have a small budget for sending custom emails to a small list of people.

Have you heard of MailMerge for Gmail or used it? What are you thoughts?