Blog

First of all, allow us to say that we are thrilled to have such an amazing community of users. You have been very generous with your feedback, and we’d like to say thank you.

Since the last major upgrade of G Merge, the Wizy.io engineering team has been working very hard, using your suggestions to create a user experience even more powerful for everybody.

Based on what you had to say, we tweaked the add-on so that you will now find the following features in G Merge:

Column Matching

We brought back the possibility of picking any spreadsheet column to match with the Document Title and Shared to fields in the add-on sidebar. This is now Data Merge’s default mode.

Turn the switch on if you want G Merge to create the following columns automatically: Document Title, Shared to/Recipient and Email Subject.

The Active Sheet

No need to rename your sheet “Data Source” to run a merge, G Merge will work on the active sheet. Just select the sheet you want to process and click Generate!

If you are scheduling an automatic batch in one sheet, the add-on stays locked on the sheet. To be able to use the add-on again you will need to unschedule the job.

Google Forms & G Merge

For the many of you using Google Forms linked to G Merge, we have great news. With this new release, you will now be able to program G Merge so that it runs automatically on form submission.

Document titles and email subjects can now be configured so they are generated automatically based on a prefix. For example, documents can be Document – 1, Document – 2 and Document – 3.

Want to share documents with only one user and send emails to just one recipient? Set document sharing and email recipients with a fixed email address.

Search Templates

Now you don’t have to lose time scrolling through your templates to find what you need. The new search function in your shared templates list makes templates management easier.

Even More Improvements

To finish off all these great new features, we have also fixed it so that all your tracking and scheduling details will follow the time zone settings of your spreadsheet, independently of that of your device. To set your spreadsheet time zone, go to File in your spreadsheet menu, and choose the item Spreadsheet settings.

The add-on will now write your dates  on your documents exactly as you write them in your data-source spreadsheet, for example 16 February 2016 or 02/16/2016.

We are listening to what you have to say. Rest assured that we will continue to work hard to deliver a great G Merge.

Keep the feedback coming!

Wizy.io product manager Mohamed Bahri started his career in informations systems consulting with companies like Accenture and E&Y, before going on his own and working freelance for different SAP programs as project manager. “My passion is entrepreneurship and business development,” says Mohamed, who co-founded Wizy.io in 2015.

You have to get your emails done right. It is, after all, your first step to getting those deals done and your sales quotas met. G Merge user Enrico Magnani is doing a great job with higher-than-average response rates to his emails with our Google Sheets add-on. Replicate his success with tips that we culled from his process, and from those of our other successful clients.

1. Send from your Gmail address. The tests we have done, and the experiences of the marketing professionals we talk to, point to the same thing: Using a real email address will get you more replies than using a marketing service.

If you are writing to contacts who have Gmail accounts, remember that Gmail organizes received emails into tabs. As soon as Google detects the unsubscribe links that you will inevitably have if you use a service like Mailchimp, then your email will end up in the Promotions or Updates tabs, otherwise known as Gmail Siberia. Your contacts rarely go there!

Use G Merge to send emails straight from your Gmail account. Your email is detected as a message coming from a real person, so it lands in the Primary tab, exactly where you want to be.

2. Design it simple. We may live in an increasingly visual world, but when it comes to email, the plain text varieties get the best results. Two reasons why: (1.) Email filters mean that there’s a greater chance that your image-heavy email will land in the spam folder or the Promotions tab. (2.) The recipient sees an image-heavy email and he thinks that it is a piece of marketing. He opens a simple text email and gets the feeling that he is talking to a real person. With G Merge, you can create emails that you save as templates so that you can use them over and over again.

3. Do your research. Part of what makes Enrico’s emails so effective are the hours he spends doing research on his prospects. Your messages have to make your contact feel like this is a real conversation. For that to happen, it is essential to have the correct information about the person you are writing to. Get his name and his position right, cite news about his work or his company, then make the job of putting all these details into your emails easy by using G Merge’s dynamic fields.

4. Don’t be shy. Follow up! No, it isn’t being annoying, it shows the person you are reaching out to that you are passionate about what you want to do. And it gets results. G Merge will track your emails, so you know when they have been opened. That means that it’s time to send a follow-up email.

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.