Apol Massebieau

We have a special spot for our education users, and was happy to hear that Data Merge has been helping the Associated Hebrew Schools of Canada become more efficient as they move their operations to the cloud.

Brian Pugh, head of literacy, is one of the forerunners in this development at AHS. Come this year’s evaluation season, the middle school will begin using a system that he has been working on since the summer. Teacher Performance Appraisal (TPA) will be performed using Data Merge with a Google spreadsheet.

It begins when the vice-principal or one of the two principals evaluates a teacher by submitting a TPA. There are about 160 questions in the appraisal, and the resulting spreadsheet is more than 700 columns wide. When the second principal gives his approval, it’s time to merge all that spreadsheet information into a document. No easy feat, given all the data!

In the beginning they tried the add-on Autocrat, but that didn’t work, as they found that it wasn’t powerful enough to handle the sheer number of spreadsheet formulas. “It maxed out at around 150 formulas,” says Brian.

“I had given up for a while,” he continues, “but then I found G Merge.” Happily, our add-on can easily do the job. “It was so easy to use. It found all my merge tags in, like, two minutes. It’s so efficient.”

With G Merge’s new release (just in time for evaluation season!) Brian can now use the filters and the scheduler to make the add-on run on a schedule, with the condition being “Approval Decision Contains Approved.”

G Merge automatically creates the merged document, and sends the URL to the approving principal for e-signing, before the document is passed on to the teacher for review. When the system is up and running, the number of teachers can go up to 200. As G Merge now displays the url of the generated document right inside the spreadsheet, keeping track of the evaluation forms is easy.

He’s spent many hours on the project, so Brian is understandably ecstatic to see it about to become part of the school’s systems. “I really thought it was never going to happen,” he says, “and it wouldn’t have happened except for Data Merge.”

Available in the GSuite Add-Ons Marketplace, you can start using G Merge right now. Enjoy a free 200 document or mail merges trial or get the unlimited plan for only $6/month.

Wizy.io’s customer success director Apol Massebieau has been a newspaper journalist, magazine editor, TV show host/producer, essay and fiction writer, and toy designer. She was an early adopter of Etsy and continues being fascinated by how small businesses thrive online.

A funny thing happened on our march to the future – we all had to become writers. We text, we blog, we post on Twitter and Facebook, and – most important for work – we email. There are 100 billion business emails transmitted every day on the Internet. This is expected to increase to 132 billion next year. That is a staggering amount of email- writing going on!

If you think about how much of this activity is aimed at making a sale or closing a deal, then you realize how much of our bottom line these days actually depends on our ability to put words together. Our best-selling add-on G Merge will allow you to write emails and save them as templates that you can use over and over again – all without leaving your spreadsheet.

To help you write these great emails that you want to use all the time – and hopefully increase the amount of money you are making – we decided to look to people who have succeeded in making a living out of their writing talents. Here are writing tips from some of the world’s most successful authors, and how we can apply these tips to writing emails that work.

1. “Hold the reader’s attention.” Remember this advice from Margaret Atwood as you think of your subject line, those first few words that have a big impact on whether or not your email gets opened. You can use a writer’s technique by being funny or creating intrigue. You can also be informative, or you can create an offer. The most important thing is that you give your reader a reason to open your email.

2. “Great is the art of beginning…,” said Longfellow. We’re great believers in a good opening sentence to start things off. You don’t want to come across as being too forward or too abrupt, but you don’t want to be too long-winded either. “I hope you are well” or “It was great to see you at xx” can work just fine.

3. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!” This tip from Ray Bradbury is our absolute favorite advice for people working in sales and marketing. Never start your business letters by talking about yourself or your company. Your “hero” is the person you are writing to, your customer. Figure out what he wants, and strive to talk about how you can give him that.

4. Kurt Vonnegut said, “Write to please just one person,” and we thank him for reminding us of the importance of having a clear buyer persona. Before you sit down to write your email, do your homework and determine who your customer is. When you have succeeded in doing that, write your email with him in mind.

5. “Clear, brief, and bold,” are what E.B. White and William Strunk, Jr. wanted our writing to be. A 200-word limit is reasonable for an email, as very few people would care to read anything longer. Keeping a tight watch on your word count will also force you to follow more of Strunk and White’s rules, namely, to omit needless words, and to use definite, specific, concrete language.

6. “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” This one comes from George Orwell. As you write your email, remember that you are there to communicate, so make sure that you do. Unless you are doing B2B marketing, stay away from words that only people in your industry will understand. The natural antidote to this tendency is to regularly read general-interest topics. Subscribe to The Washington Post, Time Magazine, even BuzzFeed. To hammer home the point, let’s quote another literary great. The king of cool Jack Kerouac once said, “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

7. “Easy reading is damn hard writing,” went Nathaniel Hawthorne. In other words, work on it. Remember that future deals will be made on the words you are typing out, so take at least 30 minutes to write and rewrite them. If you are a slow writer, take an hour. Check your dates and places, the names and titles, and the spelling and grammar. Just to be sure, have somebody else go over your email before you hit Send.

Wizy.io’s customer success director Apol Massebieau has been a newspaper journalist, magazine editor, TV show host/producer, essay and fiction writer, and toy designer. She was an early adopter of Etsy and continues being fascinated by how small businesses thrive online.