An Easier Way to Send Mass Email Notifications

Have you ever wondered how you could quickly send out an email to a group of people that you either have listed in a report or a spreadsheet? If setting up an Enterprise Server job in Vista is a little “too” technical for you, we’ve come up a quick easy way to send a mass mailing via spreadsheet.

Our need for this process came about due to our vacation policy. Twice a year (November and March) we send out an email reminder to our employees who have unused vacation days that those days need to be used before a certain date or else they will lose that time. Although it’s a basic email that says how much vacation they have and what they will lose if they don’t take it, it’s sent to a couple hundred employees which would take a long time if I manually had to send each email.

Here’s what I did: I have a report already that tells me the names of employees affected and balances, then all I needed to do was add their email address in the report. I saved it into an excel spreadsheet so if I have anything I need to manually add or delete, I can.

Next, I followed these simple steps to generate the emails:

1. Generate the report needed and save as an excel spreadsheet. The information needs to include email addresses.

2. Open Word and do Mail Merge.

3. Select recipients and browse to the Excel file you created.

You also have the ability to connect to a database directly or even Access if that is easier.

4. Write message and insert “merge” fields

5. Preview results to make sure the messages are accurate.

6. Select “Finish & Merge” to prep the email messages…

7. Complete the process by selecting the correct field where the email addresses are in your spreadsheet and add a subject for the email to be sent. Once you click OK, the messages will then be sent via email.

How easy is that?

Chrissy Koennecker
HRIS Manager

Weston Solutions

chrissy.koennecker@westonsolutions.com