Run well-targeted email campaigns with Gmail & Google Sheets

Yet Another Mail Merge provides a solution to create email campaigns with Gmail and Google Sheets. You can personalize & track each email sent. In a couple of clicks, send bulk emails to a mailing list without any coding knowledge.

Kevin William David interviewed Romain Vialard, Founder of Yet Another Mail Merge to know more.

Hi Romain, So tell us about YAMM?

I work on Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM), an email marketing tool for Gmail users. It helps to run and track well-targeted email campaigns using Gmail and Google Sheets. Yet Another Mail Merge is easy to setup and we offer a daily free quota for everyone with a Gmail or G Suite account. All you need to know is how to use Gmail and a spreadsheet.

With close to 1 million users, Yet Another Mail Merge is the top mail merge tool for Gmail users.

That’s awesome!

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

YAMM is built with Google Apps Script, a scripting language that lets you leverage the power of Gmail and other Google services in your own applications. I fell in love with Apps Script right from the beginning and used it to build many simple utilities to answer various business needs of G Suite users. Several developers had already created mail merge scripts using this technology, but I thought they were a bit difficult to use. I had the idea to reuse a Gmail draft as the email template, created a script out of that, named it Yet Another Mail Merge (because many were already available) and it was a hit!

With great adoption over time and continuous improvement to the product, YAMM grew to become the top bulk emailing tool for Gmail with personalization and tracking capabilities.

How is YAMM different from what already exists in the market?

There are top email marketing tools like MailChimp available to send bulk emails but our customers choose Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) because it is simple, affordable and delivers emails to the primary tab instead of promotions tab in inbox, which is top priority for any email marketing effort. Thus, improves the chance for better open rate & click rate than other tools.

YAMM is best suited for small & medium businesses/individuals or independent marketing teams of big enterprises, who have a Gmail/G Suite account. They should use YAMM for the following reasons:

• Simple
  YAMM is easy to install & setup. It is an add-on for Google Sheets.
• Works directly from Google Sheets
  Many of our users have their mailing lists in Google Sheets (or in an Excel file that they can easily import in Google Sheets). They can harness the power of spreadsheets (the tool that they are most comfortable with) for filtering and segmenting their lists to run email campaigns with YAMM. Once the mailing list is prepared, the user need not move away to any emailing platform to perform the mail merge. YAMM directly works on top of this mailing list and merges it with the specified email template to send emails to each recipient in the list.

• After every successful email campaign, YAMM provides the email tracking metrics (opens, clicks and responses) over the same spreadsheet. This helps them to filter and pick targets for the next campaign.
• Deep personalization of email messages & personalized attachments
  For email personalization, YAMM’s users are at their full freedom to customize their email messages to any level with help of spreadsheet columns, from a few parameters to personalizing the whole sentence. To send personalized attachments to each recipient, YAMM has a matching system where it automatically detects the appropriate file (based on a unique merge field), adds URLs of the files from the specified Google Drive and send them as attachments to the email.
• Better Open and Click Rates
  YAMM leverages the Gmail API for email delivery. This means that emails are in fact being sent by Gmail / Google, we do not manage any mail server ourselves. It helps to land the bulk emails from a sender’s gmail into the primary tab of the recipients’ inbox rather than in promotions tab. This increases the chance of better email opens and thus better click rates.

• Lean & seamlessly integrated within Google environment (G Suite)
  Many a time, a CRM or a marketing automation platform may be overwhelming and costly for simple or periodical email marketing needs. So a simple, yet a complete solution like YAMM which utilizes their existing technology stack is a great advantage. It perfectly integrates with the G Suite apps like Google Sheets, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Contacts. They do not have to switch to another environment.
• Affordable
  YAMM is offered as a freemium software :
  - Free forever, for sending up to 50 emails/day. Email tracking reports are available.
  - With premium version, one can send/schedule up to 1500 emails/day. It is best priced at $24 per year which makes it very affordable compared to the competition.

Who uses YAMM? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

YAMM is a horizontal market software available for free for anyone with a Google account. So, it attracts a broad audience — from individuals to independent marketing/CRM teams of big enterprises. Our customers from different walks of businesses include:

• Individuals: Solo entrepreneurs, Startup founders, Freelancers, Teachers, Student groups, Small business owners
• Teams, Enterprises or Education Institutes: Email marketers, Marketing agencies, Startup Sales teams, Event/Offer promotion teams, Recruiters and Human Resources Managers, Non-profits

As on today, YAMM has about 900,000+ users across over 9800 companies. Our marquee customers include Uber, Airbnb, Motorola, The Economist, Harvard University, The Atlantic.

How are your customers using YAMM? Could you share a few different use cases?

Like its name suggest, YAMM’s primary use case is “Mail Merge” — sending personalized bulk emails towards effective one-to-many email communication.

Email Marketing

The majority of the use cases of YAMM are for Email Marketing. YAMM receives Siftery’s best-in-class award as a Top Email Marketing platform with 15% of market share. Our customers use it for sending their

• Inbound Marketing emails — Newsletters, Lead nurturing, Follow-up, Customer relations/Subscriber engagement, Surveys, Announcements/Updates
• Outbound Marketing emails — Lead generation, Marketing & Promotions, Sales

Email Personalization

The second biggest category of use cases are by Education Institutes/Teachers. YAMM is awarded by Siftery as the Top Email Marketing platform used by 36% of US universities. They use YAMM for their:

• Teacher-Student/Teacher-Parent communication (Assignment feedback, Grade sheets, Progress update, Reminders)
• School-Parent communication (Calendar of events & meetings, Policies, Registration, Newsletters & variety of announcements)

Transactional/Triggered emails

Other than for bulk emails, YAMM is also used for sending transactional/triggered emails. This is particularly helpful in email automation for marketing/sales teams.

We use YAMM ourselves for sending invoices to our customers. Every invoice is unique — by the customer, the type of their license and purchase/renewal date. These invoices are sent upon payment. We automated this process with YAMM, to send these transactional emails based on the Google form submission trigger.

Also, like us, some of our customers use YAMM to send membership confirmation/welcome emails and tailored onboarding emails to their customers.

Personal communication

YAMM is also used as a personal communication tool for sending personal announcements, wedding/party invites, seasons greetings to many recipients.

Have there been unique use cases for YAMM that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

I named the product Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) because the purpose was to do a mail merge, ie send personalized emails to a list of recipients. But in fact, a very big portion of our users are not personalizing their emails. They simply put a list of email addresses in their spreadsheet and send the same email to everyone, because YAMM is also a great tool for that. I had not expected so many users to use it like that.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Till date, YAMM’s growth is 100% organic. Our current customer base of almost a million users found YAMM through discovery or word-of-mouth within Google Sheets Add-on store (marketplace of G Suite add-ons). From being one of the first 50 add-ons on this marketplace, YAMM’s growth is consistent and happened in parallel with the growth of G Suite. Aligning the product to meet the needs of this one marketplace, had earned YAMM its rightful position as the #1 add-on for Google Sheets, but also a strong and loyal customer base. With more than 100K monthly active users and 23 million emails sent every month, YAMM’s new installations keep growing.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Maybe one of the biggest challenges was the transition from a simple script to a real SaaS product once the add-on store launched in 2014. Many users were suddenly trying the product and sending me feedback, at the time when it was still a side project for me. I had to quickly find better ways to manage this growing user base and finally the solution was to make YAMM my full time job :)

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

YAMM was from the start, tightly integrated to the G Suite environment. The UI is displayed inside Google Sheets and we rely on a lot of Google APIs (including the Gmail API, of course) to deliver our service.

Paypal was perfect to easily test the potential of monetization. I implemented the first version of our paying plan even before adding a real database! And when I decided to add one, I chose Firebase, a real time database product bought by Google at the end of 2014 and it made a big impact on the quality of the product. People love to see our email tracking UI updated in real time with the number of emails opened, clicked and responded.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Of course we are heavily relying on G Suite (Gmail, Drive, the Google Docs editors). We are also using Paypal for all transactions (more than 20 000 in 2017!) and Bitbucket as our code repository.

Technically, YAMM is mostly powered by Google Apps Script, but we are also using Firebase, a Google product, as our main database and Stackdriver (another Google product) to monitor usage and errors.

Originally published at siftery.com.