Automating your Email Outreach with a Google Sheets Template

There has been plenty of times in my life where I had to send the same email to multiple people. Whether you’re cold emailing potential leads, contacting webmasters for a guest post or pitching to journalists, template emails are pretty common around us and chances are you’ve already had to write a few of those.

The problem with those emails is finding a good balance between customization and what I call “templating”. You obviously want your reader to feel like the message they’re reading has been written for them. If you’re applying for a job for instance, you want to mention the name of the recruiter, the name of the company, maybe one of their clients, some skills required for the job and the position you’re applying for.

It can become quite confusing to send multiple of the same emails to different companies while always having to change the content to match your recipient’s information, and this is without mentioning how prone to mistakes this method is. The opposite would be to write everything manually but I would not have opened this blog if it was to tell you to do stuff manually.

No, today, I’m gonna share a Google Sheets spreadsheet I made that will solve this problem of ours forever. With this spreadsheet you will be able to paste your emails with up to 30 custom fields you’re interested in customizing, fill up the information of up to 5 different recipients and watch the spreadsheet give you five different emails tailored for each one of your contacts. Ready ? Let’s dive into it.

Getting Ready

The first thing you want to do is head there :

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FUuAvrkuZ_QbTriBYwoPjkY2kwBjbZXLRt0aAV1Fem0/edit?usp=sharing

This link is the Google Spreadsheets where everything will happen. Make a Copy of it in your own Google Drive by clicking on “File” -> “Make a copy”.

Starting now, you have access to your own version of the Spreadsheet. Open your favorite Text Editor and start writing your email :

As you can see, some of the words are between curly brackets. This is where the spreadsheet is going to replace the words by whatever you’re going to define at the bottom of the spreadsheet.

Setting Up

Once you are satisfied with your text, double click on the cell A3 and paste your content. One of the disadvantages of this program is that you will lose the formatting such as bold/italic text but thankfully, line breaks and tabulations will be preserved.

At this stage, a list of your custom fields should appear under the column “Custom Fields”. You will also notice that five versions of your text will have appeared at the right side of your original text. These are your five emails getting ready to be built. At the bottom of each version, you will find a column “Recipient # Information” adjacent to the list of custom fields available within your original text.

This last bit I mentioned is where you’re gonna fill the information specific to each and every one of your recipients in order to build the email tailored to them. Following the text shown initially, this is how we’d fill the first column :

Reaping the Benefits

After that, the cell under “Recipient #1” will fill the custom fields with all of the information we entered under the column “Recipient #1 Information”. The only thing left now is to copy the content of the first mentioned cell and paste it into our Email body.

Hit “Send” and you’re done ! Now you can do this over and over by batch of five contacts and be certain that your text is not gonna have any mistakes in it.

Wrapping Up

If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing this among your colleagues. If you encountered any bug or have any suggestion on how to improve this, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment under this post or you can also mail me directly.

Thank you so much for your time,