1. Customer Relationship Management Fundamentals Implementation Guide
  2. Understanding Mail Merges

Understanding Mail Merges

The Mail Merge feature enables you to create documents, envelopes, and labels in PDF format that can be used to do a mail merge. Mail Merge uses a wizard that guides you through the mail merge process, from selecting a template, generating envelopes or labels, viewing a preview of the generated mail merge document, and finalizing the process.

Mail Merge is template-driven, and you assemble the merge document by using only the template components that you need.

Mail Merge templates can reside on a local machine or on a server. Templates created by the template creation program are saved on the server, but you can maintain local copies of the template.

Templates stored on the server are kept in the same location, which means that when you do a mail merge there is no distinction between a template created as a Mail Merge document, envelope, or label. Consequently, when you create Mail Merge templates you should assign names that will help you remember the template's purpose when you do a mail merge.

You use data sets and simple templates to set up mail merge and envelope templates. You use the same programs and processes to create templates for mail merges as you do for proposal generation. The only difference in the setup for mail merge or envelope/label templates is the template type. You use these template types for mail merge and envelope/label templates:

  • MM: Use this template type when creating mail merge templates.

  • EN: Use this template type when creating envelope/label templates.

After you set up mail merge templates, you can run a mail merge. You access the Mail Merge feature from the Contact application. Before you launch the Mail Merge wizard, you must first select the contacts for whom you want to produce the Mail Merge document or envelope. Each of the contacts selected must have an address that has been flagged as the main address.

The Mail Merge wizard validates all of the data against the document and envelope templates. If data is missing, those rows are displayed but not included in the mail merge. (For example, the surname might be included in the template, but there is no system data for the surname.) The only exception for missing data is address lines 2, 3, and 4. In this case, the rows that are missing the address line data are not displayed, but are included in the mail merge.