So I needed to convince students to open up an email on a Friday night, so they would know to come in to Saturday School the next day.  So I decided to use YAMM!  YAMM is Yet Another Mail Merge, and it is an add on for google sheets.

How do you use it to send emails to each of your students?

1. Write a draft of the email that you want to send but don’t send it, keep it as a draft.  In the email if there are places where you want the student’s first or last name to appear use <<first>> or <<last>>.  Here is the email that I sent:

Dear <<First>>,

I’m coming back early from my conference because I wanted to make sure that as many students earn credit as possible.  Given that you, yes you <<First>> <<Last>>, have a chance to earn credit, please come to Saturday school to take advantage of it.  If you already gave the assignment to one of my assistants, let me know.
I hope to see a lot of kids on Saturday,
Carl
The next step is to create a google sheet with the kids first and last name, as well as their email addresses in each row.  It’s important that the first column of the spreadsheet have the headers, which would be ‘first’, and ‘last’ above the columns with that information.  Inside of this google sheet, you can go to the add on market place, search for YAMM and authorize it.
The final step is to go through and carry out the YAMM instructions.  It walks you through it, but here are the basics.  The first window will ask if you want to buy anything, but purchases are optional.  It will ask you for the recipients, which would be the email addresses.  Then, you choose the draft and it loads all of the recent draft emails from the associated email account.  Finally, you can test send the emails, or send them all!