Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Google Contacts: Creating Mailing Lists”.
In this article, i’m going to show you how to more effectively use your google contacts so that you can use gmail more effectively and really make it more fun to use. So here i am in google contacts. If you don’t know how to get there, what you want to look for once you’re signed into your account, is this symbol here in the upper right, the google apps symbol and i’m going to switch to gmail just so, you can see what that experience is like. So here on gmail.com, let’s say i want to compose an email instead of simply typing in the email address each time, i’d like to be able to type in the name of a person and select that person’s email and then begin composing a message to that person. So to set that up in advance, let’s say there’s 20 or 30 people that you regularly send messages to, and you want to be able to have their contact information at your fingertips when you need it here in gmail.
Just click on this google app symbol and look for contacts and it takes you to the right place. So here’s the list of all of my contacts in my account, some of them have their first and last names and their email addresses. It looks like very few. Have their phone numbers in here, but how did i get these into my account? Well, i clicked here on create contact. You can choose to create one contact at a time or create multiple contacts and later in the video i’ll show you how to group these contacts together so that you have a mailing list of five people: 10 people – maybe 100 people – that you could send the same Message to all at once, let’s first look at create contact when you select that it takes you to a screen where you can put in the person’s name. Last name you can put in the company or organization that they’re part of put in their job title and those two things are options that are nice.
I do sometimes add that information, but really the core thing that you need to add is email address. So i put that in and then i like to also add phone numbers. If i know the person’s phone number – and i do also sometimes put notes if you click show more there’s even more information that you can put in there like addresses birthdays, etc. I could also click this button to add a photo for this contact. These are some images i’ve used in the past.
Maybe this person loves cats and i associate them with cats that might be a good contact photo to use and then i can click save. So that’s how you can create one contact at a time now, when i go to my list of contacts and i type in jason, there’s jason wixom with all of his information now it is possible to also create multiple contacts at once. Let’S say you have a list of email addresses, maybe it’s been exported from another email program, maybe outlook or something else that you’ve used in the past. You can paste in that list of email addresses and as long as there’s a comma between each email address. You’Ll be able to then click create and all of those will be imported at once.
You can see i’ve done that with some of these email addresses here. How do i know because in some cases they don’t have their full name so, for example, barrett9 gmail.com? I can click on that and i can edit that contact put in first name put in last name and any other information. I want to add so i do that quite a bit i’ll import and create contacts for like 10 or 15 or 20 different email addresses all at once and then later. If i feel like it, i go in, and i add the rest of the details that matter to me going back to my list.
You can of course, select these three dots to the right of one of your contacts, click those and choose delete. If you want to get rid of a contact – and you can also star those contacts that are particularly important – that maybe you want to be able to find quickly when needed now, one of my favorite things about using google contacts is labels. I love to create labels and use those labels to send dozens of people the same message all at the same time. So let’s look at that.
If i click on create label, i can set up a new label, i’m going to name this label. Faculty click save! Let’S say i want to be able to send one message to every single member of the faculty at my school. Well, i can do that right now, though, the faculty label is empty. So let’s change that. So, let’s add this label to some contacts to do that.
I’Ll just go here to contacts and now you’ll notice that there are starred contacts at the top, it’s easier to find them, because i starred them, but let’s say adrian, is on the faculty bonita candice and kerry with those selected. I can now go up here to manage labels and i can add the faculty label to each of them. Now it’s important after clicking faculty, i do need to click apply for it to actually take effect.
Let’S see if it worked, it says it worked here at the bottom, but if i go to my faculty label and click you’ll see that now there are four people with that label. I could create a second label i’ll call this one accreditation committee, click save, but no one has that label. Yet i’ll go back to contacts and let’s say that adrian winters is not only part of the faculty but she’s also on the accreditation committee. How would that work? Well, i’ll select the people that are on that committee.
I’Ll click, this manage labels, button and i’ll. Just click accreditation committee apply now, let’s go there and you can see adrian is on both lists, but the rest of the people are different. Let’S say adrian winters leaves the school and goes to another school or leaves a business goes to another business. How would i manage that? Well, i can just click on adrian winters. It pulls up her information.
You can see the two labels that she has accreditation committee and faculty, and now i can just simply click this labels button and remove both of these labels from adrian winters. I click apply. Her contact information is still in my contacts but she’s no longer included on the accreditation committee mailing list and she’s, also not in the faculty mailing list.
Now, let’s say carrie lingworth gets added to the accreditation committee. That’S okay! I can easily add that here i would just click on the labels, button and click here to add a check mark so now carrie has replaced adrian on the accreditation committee, at least in my labels, which are essentially mailing lists now think about how powerful this is. You can create labels for every subset of people that you email.
I could have one for the parents of my students. I could have one for the administration at my school at a business. I could have one for the board of directors or investors, whatever subset of your contacts that you would like to send messages to, you could create a label for them.
Click save yeah, it’s empty, but pretty quickly. You can fill it up with new contacts. Another simple way to do this is to set up the label first and then create the contacts of the people that should have that label. So here i am in the parents label there’s nobody there, but i can click create contact, create a contact and notice that this new contact is automatically labeled as a parent i put them in click, save i really need to add an email address there, but that’s! Okay, i can click back and now you can see. I have a new contact with the proper label. Switching back to gmail, you can see, i can now click compose and i can type in accreditation, committee and gmail automatically recognizes that my google contacts account has a list of people with that label.
It pulls in all of their email addresses and i can continue to compose my message and then click send. If i want to message the whole faculty i just type in faculty there. It is i’m ready to send my message, so i hope you can see the power of using contacts and not just using it as a list of every single person you’ve ever emailed, but by managing your contacts, editing them adding details so that you always are able To contact people the way you want to or need to contact them add a star for those that you want to quickly and easily find there’s just so much. You can do to manage your contacts more effectively and make using gmail so much more enjoyable and effective.
If this video proves to be popular, i may make an advanced google contacts, tips and tricks video in the future, where we cover some great features that most people don’t use but either way. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow and subscribe and when you do subscribe, click the bell so you’ll be notified. When i post another video, if you’d like to support my channel, you can do that by clicking the thanks button below the video or by supporting me on my patreon account or by banging channel merch and you’ll, see information about those options in the description below the Video .