How to send a campaign
from a Google Sheet

What you need

• A Google account — the one the messages will be sent from.
• A Google Sheet with the list of addresses, in that same account.
• The text of the message. You can write it right in the app.

Step 1. Prepare the sheet

There is exactly one requirement: the first row holds the column headers. Everything else is taken as it is.

What happens while the sheet is read:

• Rows with no address, or with an obviously invalid one, are skipped silently.
• Duplicates are dropped: one address gets one message even if it appears three times.
• Column names are lowercased — Name and name behave identically in a template.
• Any column becomes a placeholder, not just the name.

Step 2. Connect Google

Open the app and grant access to Gmail and Google Sheets — on Google's own page. The service never sees your password and cannot; access is revoked in one click in your Google account settings. What exactly is requested, and why, is on the about page.

Step 3. Add the sheet

Paste the Google Sheets link and pick the columns holding the addresses and the names. The service reads the sheet, shows how many recipients it found and remembers the choice — the next campaign on the same sheet does not ask again.

Step 4. Write the message with placeholders

The message is written in the built-in composer (or taken from a Gmail draft). A placeholder is a column name in double curly braces:

Hello {{name}}! We are opening in {{city}} next month.

Placeholders work in the subject line too. Worth knowing:

• An empty cell becomes an empty string and the message still goes out, so it is safer to phrase the sentence so that it reads without the value as well.
• A typo in a placeholder name is caught once, when the campaign is created, not halfway through sending.
• Values from the sheet are escaped: markup that ended up in a cell by accident will not break the message layout.

Step 5. Test it on yourself

Send one message to your own address and look at it in your mail app, not in the preview. Check that the name was substituted, that the subject reads well, that the links work, that the unsubscribe link is visible and that nothing falls apart on a phone.

Step 6. Start the campaign

Before it starts you see the subject, the recipient count and the daily cap. After that sending runs on its own: message by message, with a pause of 5–10 seconds. On reaching the daily cap (100 messages by default) the campaign pauses and continues the next day, so it never runs into the Gmail limit.

What to watch afterwards

• Sent — how many messages went out and how many are left.
• Opened — the open rate. The number is approximate: some recipients never load images, and their open is not counted.
• Clicks — which links people followed.
• Unsubscribes — they also join the sheet's suppression list, so the next campaign skips those people.

Common mistakes

Next: how to stay out of spam, Gmail limits, and the same thing over the HTTP API if campaigns need to start from your own software.