Let’s be real. What comes to mind when you receive an email that seems to have been sent to a million other people? press the delete key immediately? send it to the spam box?
The thing is, people hate being lumped into a group: they want to be addressed personally. but there are still large groups that still don’t know how to send personalized emails to a group. in fact, to avoid making the big mistake, some people have resorted to copying and pasting email addresses over and over until everyone gets their message. the bad thing about that? it eats up your productive time.
With distribution lists, you can treat a group of contacts as if they were a single entity. So let’s learn how to create a distribution list in outlook.
what is a mailing list?
This is a list of email addresses (and current phone numbers) created from your contact list that allows you to email everyone at once. you can save the list to your contacts folder, where you can easily access it when you send an email.
outlook mailing list
outlook offers one of the most convenient features that allows you to create and send messages to people through a contact distribution list. so when you want to send an email to a handful of contacts, or thousands of them, the distributed list makes it easy for you.
Although there are versions of outlook that limit the number of contacts you can have in your list (earlier versions of outlook, 2007 sp1 and earlier), there is no limit to the number of contacts you can add to the distribution list for versions later than outlook 2007.
how to create a distribution list in outlook 2013?
here is the quick procedure:
Step 1: After opening Outlook 2013, select the People tab.
Step 2: Click on New Contact Group under the Home tab.
Step 3: A new window will pop up. On the window find a small area named Add Members and click on it to add more people to your group.
Step 4: Type the name of your contact distribution list on the name field. The name you provide will be displayed in your contacts folder.
step 5: once you have finished adding members to your distribution list, click save & The new mailing list’s close button should now display on your contacts page.
how to create a distribution list in outlook 2010
Step 1: After opening outlook 2010, go to the menu ribbon and select the contacts tab.
step 2: select contact groups for new items.
Step 3: In the new window that appears, find and click the New Members button.
Step 4: Type the name of your distribution list in the Name field. Just like in the Outlook 2013, the name for your new distribution list will be displayed in your contacts folder.
step 5: once you have finished adding contacts to the new list, click save & button close your new distribution list will appear in the age of your contacts.
how can you manage your distribution list in outlook?
Congratulations, you have now created your distribution list. what makes it exceptional is the ease with which you can edit your contact list. how can you achieve that? simply click on contacts in the navigation pane and then double click on the name of the person whose details need to be edited.
outlook will take you to the same screen you used to create the distribution list. while on this screen you can make all the changes you wanted to make to the contact list.
Here is how you can do it:
- if you want to remove someone from the list, select their name and then click the remove button.
- if you want to add someone to the list, press add new. select address book if the contact you want to add is in your address book. but, if you are adding a new contact, select new email contact.
However, if you want to make a lot of edits to your distributed list, it would be wise to delete the existing list and create a new list.
how to send an email to your new distributed list
Now that you’ve created your mailing list, you can easily use it to send an email to your list. the new list will be displayed in your contact list. if you want to send an email to the list, just add it to the “to” address bar, the same way you add an individual contact to the address bar.
This is the quick procedure:
step 1: go to your mail tab and click the new email button to create a new message.
Step 2: Once you have your new email screen, click the “to:” button.
Step 3: In the new address book that appears, double-click the name of your mailing list. Go back to the mail tab and click the new email button.
Step 4: Once you have your new email screen, click the to button. the name of your mailing list will appear in the “to” field.
Don’t just send email to a list – Send more personalized emails.
Thanks to saleshandy, you can make Outlook work better for you. With saleshandy’s mail merge with outlook feature, you can send personalized emails to multiple recipients, that is, up to 5000 in a day. and no one will be able to tell if you send the emails to other people.
what do you need to do to get started?
- Sign up for a free saleshandy account.
- Create a saleshandy outlook email template.
- Set up an email campaign in outlook
- send and track email opens, replies, and link opens
(see sample track results below).
Saleshandy enables you to measure the campaign success rate by giving you:
- number and percentage of emails opened by your recipients.
- number of links clicked.
- number/percentage of responses you receive.
That way, you’ll be able to identify the leads you want to target for sales.
conclusion
Thanks to Outlook’s mailing list feature, you no longer have to send emails that look like they’re regurgitating pig shit. The feature helps eliminate the hassle of copying and pasting emails over and over again, saving you time and resources.
but, if you need to go a step further, you may want to keep track of everything that happens with your email along the way. however, outlook does not have such sophisticated tools.
However, with saleshandy, you can make your perspective work for you. saleshandy not only allows you to send personalized emails to up to 200 recipients via outlook at a time, but also gives you actionable insights you can use to stimulate the next wave of sales.