Configure A Mail Merge

You can also mail merge a document from within Hi-mail. You can perform a mail merge from the i wish to… menu in your Hi-mail dashboard. Performing a mail merge requires you to upload and map a data file and also upload a letter to be used in the merge. When performing a mail merge within Hi-mail you are only able to merge address information so if you require other information in the letter body to be merged you may wish to pre-merge the document using Word or a 3rd party business application before uploading your document.

Performing a mail merge

To perform a mail merge within Hi-mail:

1. Upload your letter, with the address left blank, via the Virtual Printer or by logging in to Hi-mail and selecting Send a new document from the I wish to… menu.
2. Select Mail Merge from the Production Output > Recipient section.
3. The recipient address section will be blank and a message saying “No recipients found. Click on the following link to add” will be displayed.
4. Click Manage Recipients.
5. Any saved recipient lists will be displayed in the section From my library.
6. You can upload a new set of recipients by clicking Browse.
7. Choose the type of separator in your file. A CSV file uses a comma to separate data, Otherwise use a semi-colon.
8. Click Import.

Now follow the section below – Recipient Mapping.

Recipient Mapping

Now we need to tell Hi-mail which fields in your data are for which parts of the address. This is called recipient mapping. To do this we simply need to select the right part of the data from the drop-down boxes.

• Recipient Title – The title of your recipient. E.g Mr, Mrs etc.
• Recipient First Name – The first name of the recipient.
• Recipient Last Name – The last name of the recipient.
• Recipient Company – If you are sending letters to a company address you can select their company name here.
• Recipient Address Line 1, 2 & 3 – You can have up to 3 address lines. These do not include the Town, County, Country or Postcode.
• Recipient Postcode – The postcode of the address.
• Recipient Town – The Town name
• Recipient Country – If you are sending any documents overseas you must select the country.
• Recipient Phone. The phone number of the recipient if present in the data.
• Recipient Mobile – The mobile number of the recipient if present in the data.
• Recipient Fax – A fax number for the recipient if present in the data.
• Recipient Email – An email address for the recipient if present in the data.

Finally tick the box if you wish to ignore the 1st line of the data file. This is used if you have data headers in your data file and you do not wish to display these as a letter.

NOTE: When selecting your data field in the drop down menus you must select NONE for any options that you are not using.

When you are happy with your recipient mapping click on the Validate Arrow in the bottom right. Your list of recipients will now be displayed with the headings Name, Postcode and Email. Click on the i icon on the right to see the full address for each recipient. Don’t worry if the name or email sections are blank. If you have not specified a name or email address for each recipient they will not display here.

Configure A Mail Merge Continued…

Click on the Next Step arrow to continue.
You will now be returned to the Send a mail screen and can continue with your mailing as normal.
Follow the instructions from Configure Your Sending Options > Attachments to continue.

Notes:
Hi-mail limits the number of recipients in a single mail merge to 1000. If you wish to send a mail merge to more than 1000 recipients please split the data file into multiple files.
When you have completed your mailing and reached the validation screen you will be able to preview the entire document by clicking Preview PDF under the document preview to check your addresses.
In the section recipient address it will show the number of addresses being mailed to.
If you are sending mail overseas to a country where the postcode starts with a 0 make sure that the fields in your data file are not set as text fields as the leading zeros will be removed.