Today, you’ll learn how to send bulk emails from Outlook using Microsoft Excel.

Sending bulk emails manually is like handing out business flyers one by one at a conference—it’s slow, tedious, and inefficient. If you’ve ever tried to email multiple recipients using Outlook, you know how frustrating it can be to copy, paste, and personalize each message.

But here’s the good news! With Excel and a simple mail merge process, you can automate everything and send personalized emails in minutes. Besides mail merge, there are other methods, like using an Office Add-in or setting up a Power Automate flow. In this tutorial, I broke these down step by step, making these methods easy for you to master. Let’s dive in!

Using an Office Add-In

Firstly, I’ll show you the easiest method you can use to send bulk emails from your Outlook app using an Excel worksheet with the help of any Office Add-in.

The best two Office Add-ins available in the Office Add-ins Store are the following two:

• Mail Merge for Excel
• Mailmeteor Mail Merge

You can search and install any of these for free by going to the Developer tab.

Now, click on the Add-ins command in the Add-ins block.

The Office Add-ins dialog box will show up. Now, navigate to the Store tab and click on the Search field.

Type the name of the Office Add-in and hit Enter to get it.

Click on the Add button to install the extension.

It’ll automatically show up in the Home tab of the Excel desktop app.

If you don’t have the Developer tab in your Excel desktop app, go through this Excel guide:

📒 Read More: 2 Ways to Add the Developer Tab in Microsoft Excel

Once you’ve installed the Mailmateor Mail merge Add-in, click on its icon in the Home tab. Ensure you do this on the Excel worksheet where you’ve got the recipients’ names and email addresses that you wish to include in your bulk emailing project.

Its user interface will open as a right-side navigation panel.

Click on the Sign in with Microsoft or Google option and follow the onscreen instructions to sign in to the Office Add-in using your Microsoft or Google Account.

This step is important and necessary to securely store your email templates and mail merges in an online account maintained by Mailmateor.

If the sign-in is successful, you should see the screen shown above.

You should see the New mail merge navigation panel.

Click on the Recipients field and choose the column from the active worksheet that has all the email addresses to be included in this bulk emailing campaign.

Select the Sender name field and type in your name as the email sender.

Click on the Email message field and choose an email content template. Since you’re using it for the first time, you won’t have any saved templates.

Upon clicking the field, you’ll get the Create a new template option. Click on that, and the Add-in will automatically redirect you to the website interface of the Add-in.

You’ll see the New template page. Use that page to create an email body template along with a subject line. Click on the Save template button to save it.

Now, go back to the Excel worksheet and click on the Email message field again and choose the New template email content.

Now, simply click on the Send 10 emails button.

Alternatively, you can click on the down arrow in the Send 10 emails button and choose Schedule send.

On the next screen, you’ll get a calendar and a time slot to schedule the bulk emailing process for a later date and time.

The Grant access pop-up will show. Click on the Allow Mailmeteor button.

Follow onscreen instructions to complete the authorization process.

Once the authorization is complete, you’ll see that the emails have been sent automatically from your Outlook account.

For quick authorization, make sure your Outlook email is logged in to the Outlook web and desktop app versions.

This method has a drawback in that it can only send emails to 10 recipients at a time. Also, this method uses a third-party web infrastructure that stores your email content.

If you wish to use a DIY process to send bulk emails to unlimited recipients, use any of the following two methods instead:

Using Mail Merge in Microsoft Word

If you want to manually run the bulk emailing process, you can use Microsoft Word’s Start Mail Merge command to use the dataset in an Excel worksheet and send emails to the listed email addresses from your Outlook app. This is a bit manual since you need to create the mail merge every time you want to send bulk emails with some customizations.

To practice this method, start with an email template like the one shown above. Preferably, create this email template in a Word document.

Create text placeholders, like [First Name], [Last Name], [Job Title], [Address], etc. These will serve as the places to include data from the Excel worksheet.

Since I’ve got the following columns in my source dataset for bulk emailing, I’ve created the above-mentioned text placeholders for custom data insertion during mail merge:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Job Title
• Address

Now that you’ve prepared the email body, let me walk you through the mail merge process in quick and easy steps.

Now, when the source Word file is open, navigate to the Mailings tab and click on the Start Mail Merge drop-down menu.

Click on the E-mail Messages option from the context menu.

The document will be displayed in an email-like format.

Click on the Select Recipients drop-down menu and select the Use an Existing List option.

The Select Data Source dialog box will open. Use that to browse the local or network storage and select the source Excel workbook where you’ve got the necessary data for mail merging, like Email Addresses, First Name, Last Name, etc.

The Select Table dialog box will show up. Choose the table from the dialog box that contains the source data. Ensure checkmarking the checkbox for the First row of data contains column headers option.

The Insert Merge Field command will become activated in the Write & Insert Fields block.

Now, select the previously placed text placeholders in your email, like [First Name], [Last Name], [Job Title], [Address], etc., one by one, click on the Insert Merge Field command, and choose the relevant field from the context menu, like First_Name for [First Name], Last_Name for [Last Name], and so on.

Once you have selected and replaced all of the text placeholders with merge fields, click on the Preview Results command to switch to the actual view from the merge fields view. Use the Next Record button to cycle through all the email recipients.

This way, you can check if the emails have been created accurately or not for all the entries.

Now, click on the Finish & Merge drop-down arrow and choose the Send Email Messages option from the context menu.

The Merge to E-mail dialog box will show up.

Use this configuration window to customize the following:

• To: It should be selected to the column header that contains all the recipient emails.
• Subject line: Enter a subject for the email here.
• Mail format: It should be HTML.
• Send records: You can choose from three options, and these are All, Current record, and From XX To YY values.

Click OK to finalize the mail merge.

Microsoft Word will automatically use your dataset in the Excel worksheet to send the bulk emails through Outlook.

Besides these methods, you can also use a few other processes to send bulk emails from Outlook using the Excel desktop app. These are:

• Excel VBA
• Office Scripts
• Power Automate

Read the following Microsoft Excel guide to learn these methods effortlessly:

📒 Read More: 4 Ways to Send Email from Microsoft Excel

Conclusions

So, now you know how to send bulk email from Outlook using Excel using the two most common approaches. The first one is suitable for you if you wish to use a third-party Office Add-in to get the job done. Be aware that this method requires you to upload email content in a server maintained by the Add-in developer.

The second method involves using a few manual steps but is fully secured since you’re using all resources from your computer. No need to upload any content to a third-party server. This is using the Mail Merge function in Microsoft Word.

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