“Dear valued client” sure doesn’t make me feel valued.

Nothing says “impersonal and indifferent” as much as a generic letter or email,  whether it’s your annual Holiday letter to friends or a form sent to clients and potential clients. It’s deeply impersonal. There’s no reason for this. Customizing form letters or emails to make them appear more personal and directed specifically at the receiver isn’t difficult.

The trick is this: start Mail Merge from Outlook using your contact list, not from Word.

Why? Outlook offers better filtering capability than Word. So, while you can begin a mail merge in Word, it’s easier to start it in Outlook.

• Begin by selecting the contacts you wish to include in the merge. You can hold the ctrl or shift key as you select contacts or use “custom views” to display the contacts you want to use. This is an excellent reason to use categories–then you can group by category and select the contacts.
• Now select Tools and Mail Merge to open the Mail Merge dialog, and you’re almost done. Choose whether to use all contact fields or only those fields in the view.
• Then choose the type of document to merge (letter? email) and select OK to complete the merge.
• The selected contacts are exported to a document called OMM.doc for Word to use as the data source.  Outlook seamlessly passes your contact list to Word.

Use the Mail Merge Wizard Task pane to lead you through the final steps. Beginning the merge from Outlook’s Tools and Mail Merge menu puts you at Step 3 in the Mail Merge wizard.   You can go back to Step 1 if you need to select a different merge type or make other changes.   If you’ve outgrown the Mail Merge wizard, use the Mail Merge toolbar to insert fields, select the document to merge to, and the ABC button to display your data in the merge fields. You’re finished, send the document to the printer or email it.  Your clients, friends or family will feel much more valued…just because you used their names!