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Mail merge made easy

It's so simple to personalize your email to each recipients with a Coda doc.
Hung Doan
Have you sent a templated email to someone, but forgot to update their name in the email? I’ll admit it, I’ve done it too many times. When I was an Engineering Manager at CZI, I’d often make a mistake to send the “Request feedback” email for people, but with the wrong name in it. Happens every (mid-cycle) performance review cycle. It’s embarrassing but also easy to make this mistake due to the number of emails & repetition involved in it.
Well, it’s no longer! I’ve found an easy solution for this problem, using
Coda
⁠
.

Mail merge

Instead of doing it by hand with each email, I can construct personalized email for each recipient automatically. Each email is generated based on data on each row! Turns out there is a term for this process. It’s called
Mail-merge
⁠
.
If you’re curious how the “Send Email” button works, feel free to
Copy this doc
⁠
and play around with it. It’s built on top the
Gmail
⁠
pack and the
format
⁠
formula.
⁠
Send all
⁠
Email about
Send to
Preview
Send Email
Email Sent
Resend?
1
Alex
Donald
Preview email
Send Email
Clear
2
Donald
Harry
Preview email
Send Email
Clear
3
Alex
Harry
Preview email
Send Email
Clear
There are no rows in this table
⁠


Email Preview

Email about
Send to
Email
1
Alex
Donald
Requesting feedback for Alex

Hi Donald,
Can you write some feedback for Alex? [More context and guidance goes here]
Thank you,
Harry
There are no rows in this table
⁠


Template

It’s very easy to change the template as well. I wrote a simple template here for requesting feedback, but it could be to send congratulation messages to offered candidates, welcome notes to new hires, or reaching out to potential candidates!
There is 1 template down here, but it is easy to customize this doc to support multiple templates! (Hint: use a select and filter the Email Template list to only the selected one).
Subject
Content
Hint
1
Requesting feedback for {1}
Hi {2},
Can you write some feedback for {1}? [More context and guidance goes here]
Thank you,
Harry
{1} is the name of the person in the "Email about” column
{2} is the name of a person in the “Send to” column
There are no rows in this table
⁠

People

Curious where the email and name come from? I have a small list of people down here with their info. Better yet, if people you are sending email to is in Coda workspace, you can get use “Person” column type instead, and you can extract their name and email from their Coda account, like this:
Hung Doan
⁠
Name
Email
1
Harry
hdoan@coda.io
2
Alex
example@email.com
3
Donald
example2@email.come
There are no rows in this table
⁠

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