When connecting to a Google Sheets spreadsheet to send a mail merge campaign, you can now specify filter criteria to pull only certain email addresses that match the criteria. Be sure to reload Gmail in Chrome to get the update.
You'll notice a new "Filter Rows" box when connecting to a spreadsheet.
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This post explains how to use the "Filter Rows" box and what to type to get the rows that you want to select. Specify one criteria per line, in the format:
ColumnName=Value
For example, if you have a spreadsheet column called "Company", and you want to send a mail merge campaign to just everyone who's Company is "Microsoft", you would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Instead of the = sign, you can instead use the ~ operator to represent "contains". For example, let's say that your email addresses are in a column called "Email". You want to send to only @yahoo.com addresses. You could enter:
Email~yahoo
meaning all rows where the "Email" value contains "yahoo".
Multiple Criteria
You can also specify multiple criteria. Let's say your spreadsheet has the columns "Company" and "Position". Let's say you want to send to everyone whose Company=Microsoft, and Position=Manager. You would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Position=Manager
Or, let's say that in your actual spreadsheet, the Position column had values like "Product Manager" and "Technical Support Manager", but you still wanted to email everyone at Microsoft that was some type of manager. In that case you would set the Position criteria to just "contain" the word "manager". So:
Company=Microsoft
Position~Manager
In these cases, you want rows that match both criteria. So in these cases, the boolean operator should be set to AND. You might, however, want to switch to OR in certain cases. Let's say your spreadsheet has all of your customers but you want to send a campaign to only customers with an email address at a consumer domain, like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and gmail.com. You would enter:
Email~gmail.com
Email~yahoo.com
Email~hotmail.com
Email~aol.com
And you would set the boolean dropdown to OR. Meaning you want to send to everyone where Email contains gmail.com OR Email contains yahoo.com OR Email contains hotmail.com OR Email contains aol.com.
As another example, let's go back to our spreadsheet containing the company column. You're sending a mail merge campaign to executives at billion-dollar tech companies, so you want to only send to people where Company is either Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook. You would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Company=Apple
Company=Facebook
and set the boolean dropdown to OR. If you entered this criteria and set the boolean dropdown to AND, you would get an error saying that no rows could be selected, since there isn't a single row where the Company is equal to all three of those values, as that would be impossible!
You'll notice a new "Filter Rows" box when connecting to a spreadsheet.
This post explains how to use the "Filter Rows" box and what to type to get the rows that you want to select. Specify one criteria per line, in the format:
ColumnName=Value
For example, if you have a spreadsheet column called "Company", and you want to send a mail merge campaign to just everyone who's Company is "Microsoft", you would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Instead of the = sign, you can instead use the ~ operator to represent "contains". For example, let's say that your email addresses are in a column called "Email". You want to send to only @yahoo.com addresses. You could enter:
Email~yahoo
meaning all rows where the "Email" value contains "yahoo".
Multiple Criteria
You can also specify multiple criteria. Let's say your spreadsheet has the columns "Company" and "Position". Let's say you want to send to everyone whose Company=Microsoft, and Position=Manager. You would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Position=Manager
Or, let's say that in your actual spreadsheet, the Position column had values like "Product Manager" and "Technical Support Manager", but you still wanted to email everyone at Microsoft that was some type of manager. In that case you would set the Position criteria to just "contain" the word "manager". So:
Company=Microsoft
Position~Manager
In these cases, you want rows that match both criteria. So in these cases, the boolean operator should be set to AND. You might, however, want to switch to OR in certain cases. Let's say your spreadsheet has all of your customers but you want to send a campaign to only customers with an email address at a consumer domain, like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and gmail.com. You would enter:
Email~gmail.com
Email~yahoo.com
Email~hotmail.com
Email~aol.com
And you would set the boolean dropdown to OR. Meaning you want to send to everyone where Email contains gmail.com OR Email contains yahoo.com OR Email contains hotmail.com OR Email contains aol.com.
As another example, let's go back to our spreadsheet containing the company column. You're sending a mail merge campaign to executives at billion-dollar tech companies, so you want to only send to people where Company is either Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook. You would enter:
Company=Microsoft
Company=Apple
Company=Facebook
and set the boolean dropdown to OR. If you entered this criteria and set the boolean dropdown to AND, you would get an error saying that no rows could be selected, since there isn't a single row where the Company is equal to all three of those values, as that would be impossible!