How to Pick a Mail Merge Solution

By: Stacey Tester

Regardless of the type of your organization (private, non-profit, government), you probably generate content, whether its letters or order confirmations. At almost every organization, personalizing communication and documentation is becoming increasingly important. Content needs to be distributed to multiple recipients in a consistent format, yet personalized to each recipient. You may be sending these documents through email, snail mail, or both.

If you’re a nonprofit, aside from newsletters, updates, and informational emails, you probably send out an annual fundraising ask, and subsequent thank you. If you’re in the private sector, maybe it’s a set of standardized contracts. Rather than generating each email or letter manually, Salesforce integrates with mail merge tools that can automate this process and save your organization a lot of time.

How does it work?

A mail merge is the process of generating content that is personalized for specific recipients. These individuals are most often contacts or leads within your database. You use mail merge templates to populate the body of your document, and these templates include merge fields that pull data directly from your Salesforce records (such as contact name or address). This allows you to utilize a standardized template but easily personalize it for each recipient without all of the manual work. If you’ve used Microsoft Word for a while, you’re probably familiar with the merge functionality where you can connect a letter to merge fields on a spreadsheet list; Salesforce integration lets you manage this entirely within Salesforce instead.

Most organizations would benefit from mail merge functionality regardless of how big you are or what kind of work you do. The set up is fairly simple, affordable, and the time-saving benefits are substantial.

What tools do you have to choose from?

Native mail merge: Salesforce can handle basic mail merges, provided you have access to Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word. This mail merge overview is a good place to start. To generate mail merge documents for multiple records at the same time, you will need to request Extended Mail Merge through Salesforce customer support have your internal administrator enable the feature.

If this built-in functionality isn’t robust enough for your organization, you may want to consider one of the following solutions.

Conga Composer can merge data from fields across multiple objects (including custom objects) into one template. Additionally, when you send a document via Conga Composer, it automatically attaches it to the associated Salesforce record. This removes the need to manually update a record to indicate that a document was sent; the activity and history is captured automatically. Conga also offers extended mail merge and reporting functionality through Conga Courier, which allows you to schedule and deliver automated reports. Check out the full list of Conga Composer features here. Robust in features and functionality, Conga is a strong tool with a significantly higher price point.

Apsona is another popular mail merge solution which also allows for cross-object reporting (including custom objects), has enhanced reporting functionality, and can work with your existing email and document templates. Apsona’s mail merge functionality is an add-on feature to the Apsona suite, which is both less costly and less robust than Conga Composer. Apsona might be a good choice if your organization wants to go beyond native Salesforce functionality and is interested in using other areas of functionality within the Apsona suite such as data clean-up.

*We compared these two solutions in 2013, and while both applications have changed since then, if you’re comparing them feature-by-feature, you may want to begin here.

A few considerations

When choosing a mail merge solution, it’s important to keep in mind that many of them are not designed only to do mail merging, but also to incorporate additional elements of document management. Do your homework regarding your organizational needs, and then take this knowledge into your feature comparison for each solution. You might not need a robust mail management system, but require a secondary app for a specific feature. For example, DocuSign offers mail merge functionality along with the ability to gather electronic signatures. If you need your clients to be able to sign documentation electronically without downloading, printing, and mailing the forms back to you, you’ll want to take that into account. EchoSign also offers integration with Salesforce for mail merge as part of their e-signature workflow functionality. If there are other specialized processes that your organization requires, bring your concerns to your consultant and let them help you select the best option.

Tips for success

If you want to merge fields from your Salesforce database into documents or emails, it will require that your data is captured in a way that is merge-friendly. It’s important that your organization thinks about what information you’ll need included in the documents, and that you be proactive about capturing data within Salesforce so that it can be merged later on. For example, if you work for a NPO and want to thank a donor for their contribution to a specific cause among 5 available causes, you will want to make sure the causes are captured in a way that would allow for a simple merge into a template.

Picking the right mail merge solution is one of the most tangible ways your team can save time and energy through Salesforce, plus it can greatly impact the return you get on your correspondences. If you’ve set up your mass email and payment processing integrations, this is a great area to consider updating next.