- Hey there, this is Seth,
and in this video, we're gonna talk a little bit about
how to do a mail merge for a direct mail campaign
using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
Now, I'm using the Microsoft Office 2016 for this,
and I'm also on a Mac, so just keep that in mind,
I know sometimes Microsoft switches things up a little bit
and they take certain functions and move them around
to some other place.
So, I'm gonna just take you through how that process looks
in this version of both of those programs,
but just keep in mind,
if you're looking at this in the future
with a different version of Office
or if you're using a previous version of Office,
you may have to hunt around just a little bit
to find these same functions.
So, just keep that in mind.
But when it comes to doing a mail merge,
you can do this with pretty much any kind of direct mail
whether you're using post cards or letters
or some other type of mail piece;
but for what I'm doing here,
this is for blind offers that we're sending out
to owners of vacant land,
that's the specific purpose we're talking about here,
and really, whatever your purpose is,
if you need to do a mail merge,
you go through these same basic steps.
So if you wanna just follow along,
this right here is my letter template,
and this is not the exact wording,
this is just kind of a blank form,
and I've changed around a lot of this.
If you want the actual boilerplate template that I used,
you can download that at the bottom of this blog post,
so if you're watching this on YouTube,
just so you know, there's a link beneath this video,
if you click on that link,
you can go and find the place at the bottom of the blog post
where you can download this.
But the first step you have to do is first of all
just open up whatever template you decide to use,
and in this example, you know, this is all just
sort of like blank placeholder stuff;
you can go ahead and fill out your company name
and address and all that info.
Once you get down here to the body of the message,
there's gonna be certain parts throughout this template
that you want to sort of fill in the blank
with certain pieces of information that are gonna pull
from an Excel spreadsheet.
So what you would do, is first of all,
go up here to this tab where it says Mailings,
and we're going to click on Start Mail Merge.
Click on that, we're gonna click on Letters,
and then we have to choose the recipients;
in other words, we have to choose the spreadsheet
that we want to use as our source for the data
that gets plugged into this template.
So let's go ahead and click on this,
and then we're going to Use an Existing List.
And in this case, I've got an Excel file
that I already have completely sorted and filtered
and ready to go;
you would just find it, and this is the file
that I'm looking for right there, and I will click Open,
and you might get this kind of warning or something,
just go ahead and click OK.
And I want this to pull from everywhere
in the entire worksheet, so I'm just gonna click OK here.
And just so you know,
this right here is the spreadsheet that I'm working with
right now, and what I wanna do is pull information
from certain things that I have designated
up here at the top;
so I'm gonna go back here to this section.
The first merge field that I wanna insert here
is for the date,
so what I did here is, and I'm assuming that
all these letters are going to reach their recipients
either on January 26, or shortly after January 26.
So that's why that date is plugged in here
for every single one of these recipients.
So I'm gonna go over here and highlight Date,
we're going to click Insert Merge Field,
and we're gonna say Offer Date.
That's what's gonna go in there.
And then, likewise, the next thing you hit
that I wanna insert is the owner's name, address,
city, state, and zip code.
So we're going to highlight this;
click Insert, and the first one that we wanna use here
is this one right here that says OwnerName_Formatted,
so I'll click that,
and then the next one is the address,
so we're gonna hit Insert Merge Field again,
and this will be Mail Address.
So that one's in there now.
And then city, state, and zip.
So what we could do here is just click on
Insert Merge Field again,
we're gonna say Mcity, come on,
and then Mstate.
And then Mzip.
And by the way, I should also mention,
if you filter your list in such a way that
there are these occasional separate unit numbers,
like, you know, apartment 270, or suite 12,
or number A or something like that,
then you would also want to go ahead and insert
another merge field into the address space
to make sure it picks up those unit numbers as well,
because if you don't, it may not make it to those
particular recipients 'cause they don't have
the full address.
Another way you can do it is to,
like, manually add these into the address line as well,
so you don't have to account for that additional unit field;
but if you didn't do that, keep in mind you'll want to
make sure you're adding that additional merge field
to pick up that full address.
And now this next section over here,
we're gonna say your property in County, like that,
and then, State, and again, in this hypothetical example,
we're sending this out to people
in Sonoma County, California,
so these are the columns I'm using there,
and that's the same for every single recipient.
And then for parcel number, we've got the APN right there,
so go ahead and Insert Merge Field and click APN.
Just like that, and right here we'd say Dear,
up here to Insert Merge Field,
and then, again, either Owner First Name
or OwnerName_Formatted.
I think, honestly, in a perfect world,
I would probably just use their first name, not both,
but just for this example,
we'll try to keep it simple like that.
And then property in, again, we're gonna do the same thing,
county name and the state name,
select County,
State, period.
And then we kinda fill out the rest of this stuff.
Down here, I actually mention the offer deadline
in my real template,
and again this is not the real thing that I say,
this is just sort of example language.
But what I would do is, you know,
somewhere in this last sentence I would just reiterate
what the deadline is for them to accept it.
So wherever that would be, we'll just say it's right here,
we'll click on Insert Merge Field,
and we'll say Expiration Date,
because this is the date at which they can no longer
accept my offer anymore if they don't do it
by February 5, 2017.
And then this right here, for name and title,
this is gonna be the same on every single letter
I send out,
so I'll literally just type in my name and my title,
like that, and then I would usually have like
an image of my signature, like a jpeg or a png file,
and I would just insert that picture right here
at the bottom,
so I could say insert and then grab a picture from file
and just make sure it goes right in there.
And then moving on over here to the purchase agreement,
for the date, I would basically do the same thing
that I did over on page one,
where I do Insert, Offer Date,
and then, for seller, I could just insert the name,
mailing address, city, state, and zip,
just like I did right here,
I mean, just do that exact same thing right in this section.
And then for buyer, you're gonna put your name and address.
This is gonna be the same on every single offer
you send out,
so you just go ahead and put in
whatever that information is.
And right here, I would include language that says
something like this in, and then insert again,
the county and state.
And then for the parcel number,
we will go Insert Merge Field and put the APN, like that.
For the legal description,
again, there's a couple different ways to do this.
Depending on the list service you're using,
some of them will actually include
the full legal description with every single item;
so if you have that, you can literally just find
that legal description and insert it in there.
In this case, another way to do it,
just if you wanna make it simpler, is to leave a space,
and then acres in Sonoma County, California.
And for that matter, you could also use the merge fields
to fill in that part, it's kinda up to you.
For the legal description, all we're going to do is
we're going to insert the Lot Area that we have right here.
So we know how many acres each one of these properties is;
so we'll just say Insert Merge Field,
and then scroll down here to LotArea.
And that's all we gotta do.
And then, for the offer price,
we can just highlight this piece here,
and say Insert, Offer Price, like that.
And then back here, you basically just go through
the rest of this document,
and any place where you see these kinds of brackets,
to indicate where you need to insert those
variable pieces of information,
like for example in this acceptance section,
I insert the expiration date,
so I would find wherever that is,
and then Insert Merge Field, and hit the Expiration Date,
and then in the closing date section,
there's also an area where I put in the closing deadline,
so I would find that part of the paragraph
and then insert the closing date section as well.
And then for buyer name, this is where I could just
type in the name of my company,
so if it's ABC Company, LLC, just like that,
and then I could print my name,
and then my title right here.
And again, this is all assuming that I am buying
this property in the name of an LLC.
If you're making offers in the name of just yourself,
personally, as a sole proprietor, then you wouldn't
have to include this name;
you would simply put your name right there, and that's all.
And then this over here, I just leave blank,
so that the seller, if they want to accept it,
they can fill that stuff out.
And I've also got instructions down here
where people can call me if they want to,
and I actually have a prerecorded voicemail set up
if people do do that so that I'm not answering calls
at all hours of the day.
And then you can put your mailing address here,
your email address there, your fax number,
basically giving people every possible method to sign
this thing and return it back to you if they want to.
Keep in mind when you're sending out really low offers,
it's inevitable that you're gonna get a lot of people
who think you're crazy and are never gonna
accept your offer,
and may very well respond to you with some nasty response.
That's just part of the game when you're sending out
massive amounts of low ball offers like this,
so don't sweat it, that's just gonna happen,
and that's part of the reason why I do have
this voicemail system set up
is so that I can just get their message,
and if they're mean, I just don't call them back,
it's as simple as that.
So, yeah, that's how you do a mail merge
with this particular type of template.
Once you've gotten that done,
the next thing you can do is basically
go up here and preview the results,
and take a look at this letter and make sure
it's actually showing up correctly,
it's pulled the correct information,
it's formatted the way you want it to be.
Let's go ahead and click on this, Preview Results,
and just like that we can see it's pulling this information
from this spreadsheet, and what you can do
is you can just scroll through a few of these,
or you can even just pick one at random.
You just take a look at all this information,
you know, the date, the person's name, address,
city, state, zip code, parcel number,
then move on to the next page,
see the date again, parcel number, legal description,
offer price, all of this stuff.
And just go back and forth between the Excel spreadsheet
and this actual letter,
and just make sure that for one or two or three of them,
all the information does line up correctly,
there's nothing that's kinda jumping out to you as an error.
Just kinda make sure that that's correct,
and once you know that,
you basically know that you're in business,
and this thing is ready to go.
And once you've gotten this far,
the next steps really depend on how you're planning
to complete your direct mail campaign.
One option, which is by far the least efficient,
the most expensive, and the most time consuming,
is to print all this stuff out yourself,
print out envelopes, stuff the envelopes,
put stamps on the envelopes, send them out.
It'll take you days to do that kinda thing,
especially if you're sending out thousands of these.
Would not recommend it, but if that's what you wanna do,
I'm not gonna stop you.
All you have to do is go over here
where it says Finish Merge,
and then Edit Individual Documents,
and what it's gonna do is create a new Word document
that includes those two pages for every single lead
that you had on your list.
So, as you can see down here, this new Word document
is building itself from that Excel file,
and it's gonna continue to do that
until you have hundreds and hundreds of these pages,
and you can literally go down through every single one
of these and make sure they all look exactly right.
And once they do, you just have to hit Print,
and it will literally print out all of those.
And you would basically have to do the exact same thing
with a batch of envelopes, too,
and then you could match them up and stuff them
and stamp them and get them sent out.
And I've done it before, it takes forever to do,
and you're gonna wanna pull your hair out
by the time you're done, so I would not recommend that.
What I would recommend is going with
an online mailing service like, a couple examples would be:
Click2Mail, or another one that I know of
is called ITI Direct Mail at letterprinting.net.
I've used them both, I think they're both good
for different types of direct mail,
and the prices are pretty similar.
When it comes to this particular type of direct mail
that involves a mail merge like this,
they can both do it, but they work a little bit differently;
and in the next video, I'm going to take you through
the process of how to get this done,
and I'm gonna show you how to do it with the service
that I prefer to work with.
And I'll explain a little bit more about why
when we get to that video.
So, if you wanna go to that next step,
follow along with me to the next video,
and I will show you how to complete the final stage
of this process and get your letters sent out the door.
Thanks for watching, talk to you soon.