Simplify Studio Email Communication with Yet Another Mail Merge

Any teacher who has ever planned anything knows that studio communications can be a challenge even in the simplest circumstances.

Add any level of customization (e.g., needing to tell certain students that they’re in Recital A and other students that they’re in Recital B, communicating to hundreds of students their assigned audition time for a festival), and it quickly becomes a nightmare.

There’s a little-known tool that has me super excited because it massively simplifies customized, bulk emails. The tool is a Google Sheets Add-On called “Yet Another Mail Merge” (or YAMM for short). Sounds sexy, doesn’t it?

Hub Members: Check out this video tutorial.

The Painful Way to Send Studio Emails

Have you ever had to send an email to your whole studio where most of the information was general (maybe an announcement about an upcoming recital), but you also had informatian custom to each student (perhaps a list of the music they were to perform)?

In the past, my process for tackling this task went something like this:

1. Write a general email
2. Copy and paste the email into a new draft
3. Add the personalized info
4. Enter the proper email address
5. Click send
6. Repeat steps 2-5 over and over and over again

Inevitably during this process, I would make at least one mistake. I’d forget to add the personalized notes or (more likely) I’d accidentally send Emma’s song choices to Sophie and cause a student (and/or parent) freak out.

Well, those days are over. Thanks to ************@***il.com“>Yet Another Mail Merge. Or YAMM, as the converts call it.

The YAMM Way to Send Studio Emails

Now my process looks like this:

1. Write a general email in Gmail
2. Create a spreadsheet with the pertinent custom info
3. Start the mail merge
4. Carry on with my life

Yeah. That’s it.

YAMM merges all that customized info into the general email to create a perfectly crafted, personalized email for each student and delivers it to their inbox as if I had sent it directly through my email account.

It’s a thing of beauty.

And in case that’s not awesome enough, you can also see who has opened the email you sent. You can tell those parents who somehow miss every email that you’re on to them…

Besides awesome, what exactly is YAMM?!?!

************@***il.com“>Yet Another Mail Merge is an Add-On for Google Sheets (the Google version of Excel). You can use it with any Gmail address and it’s FREE! There is a paid version available, but the features of the free version are enough for me.

Other Uses

I can think of so many ways music teachers could use this tool for easier studio email communication. These are just a few:

• Recital announcements
• Notifications for mass schedule changes
• Student progress reports
• Audition time slot announcements

So have you changed your mind? Tell me Yet Another Mail Merge isn’t sexy now.

You can ************@***il.com“>get Yet Another Mail Merge here and check out the documentation for help with setup.

How else have you simplified your studio email communication?