<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1822615684631785&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1"/>

GMass Quickstart Guide: How to Connect and Send Your First Campaign

GMass is one of the most popular, easy-to-use, and powerful mass email tools for Gmail and Google Workspace. With GMass, you’ll have mail merge and email marketing powers inside your Gmail account — there’s no new platform to learn.

In this quickstart guide, we’ll walk you through every step of installing GMass and sending your first email campaign. We’ll also point you toward lots of resources you can use to learn about GMass’s vast array of cold email, mail merge, and email marketing features.

If you’ve already installed the GMass Chrome extension in your browser, you can skip the first section below and jump to the section on connecting your Google Sheet.

Let’s get started!

GMass Quickstart Guide: Table of Contents

Downloading and Installing GMass

In order to use GMass, you need:

  • Gmail account or Google Workspace account.
  • The Google Chrome browser for your desktop computer.

GMass is a desktop app that requires a computer, not a mobile device.

Installing GMass in your browser

Download the GMass extension at the Chrome Web Store by clicking the Add to Chrome button.

Install the GMass Chrome extension

Click “Add extension” to give GMass necessary permissions in Gmail. Here’s why why we have to ask for those permissions; the short version is: Google makes us do it. But never fear, we deeply respect your privacy — and 300,000+ users in, we’ve never had a single privacy issues come up.

The first permissions: Chrome Web Store

Your browser will redirect back to your Gmail account. It’s time to officially connect GMass and your Google account. Click the “Sign up with Google” button in the pop-up box.

Click to connect GMass to your Gmail account

Choose your account in the Google authorization window.

Choose your Google account to connect

More permissions. Google isn’t messing around. Once again, GMass is required to ask for these in order to send your emails from your Gmail account. Click “Allow” to continue.

More permission requests from Google

Allow GMass to show notifications in Chrome (so you can get important campaign alerts). You may find this difficult because every instinct in your body pushes you to say no to all “allow notifications” pop-ups, but these will be worth it as you manage your campaigns.

Allow GMass notifications in Chrome

Click the “Close Window” button.

You’ll now see the GMass success overlay. Click the “Show me some magic!” button to send your first test.

You've connected GMass and Gmail, success

Sending the first GMass test email

As the email says, you can send the first test message by clicking the GMass button. In fact, whenever you send a campaign with GMass, you’ll click the GMass button rather than the Send button.

So click the GMass button to see what happens.

Click the GMass button to send the test

GMass will send your emails and you’ll see a message letting you know it was successful.

The overlay saying your send was successful

And if you head over to your Sent folder, you’ll see all 10 individual emails went out as intended.

The emails in your Gmail Sent folder

Now that you’re connected and you’ve sent your first test, it’s time to send your first campaign.

Connecting a Google Sheet to GMass for Your First Campaign

There are multiple ways to build, import, or connect mailing lists to GMass. (We have links to those at the end of this quickstart guide.)

But for mail merges and (likely) most of the campaigns you send, you’ll get your lists from Google Sheets.

The good news: GMass has a deep, powerful, and versatile integration with Google Sheets. The bad news: We’ll have to do one more round of permissions. But more good news: All the permissions are a one-time thing. So let’s rip off the bandage and get them over with.

Prepping a Google Sheet of contacts

Head over to Google Sheets and create a new spreadsheet. Then create columns called FirstName, LastName, and EmailAddress. (You can add any other columns you want and call them whatever you want; I’m just using these basic ones for our example.)

Create a Google Sheet for contacts

For this first experimental campaign, I’m going to send emails to some of my other email addresses. (If you’re feeling ambitious, you can send a real, live email campaign here!)

Google Sheet with info

Once you’re done entering your contacts, head back to Gmail.

Giving GMass Google Sheets permissions (the final permissions needed)

Click on the Google Sheets button next to the Gmail search bar. (No, that button hasn’t been there all along; GMass adds it to the interface.)

Connect GMass to Google Sheets button

Since this is your first time, you’ll need to give GMass permissions to access Google Sheets. Click “Sign up with Google” to do so. This is the last of the permissions for the process.

Give GMass Google Sheets permissions

Choose your account in Google’s pop-up window.

Choose your Google Account for permissions

Click “Allow” to give GMass permission to access your Google Drive files and Google Sheets spreadsheets.

Allow GMass to have Google Sheets and Drive access

You’re now all set up with GMass and Google Sheets.

Connecting to your Google Sheet

Now we’re done with permissions. And unless Google forgets about the authorization down the road (which it might do from time to time), you won’t have to go through this whole permission-granting process again.

To connect to the Google Sheet, click that Google Sheets button again.

Connect GMass to Google Sheets button

You’ll see a pop-up window where you can choose your Google Sheet. Choose your Google Sheet for this campaign from the dropdown.

Since this is the quickstart guide, we won’t get into the “Optional Settings” section here. You can read more about the optional settings in our article on Google Sheets mail merges.

Click on the Connect to Spreadsheet button.

Choose your Google Sheet then connect

As you can see from the alert, GMass takes all the emails from your Google Sheet and declutters them into one alias email address. GMass also hides the regular Gmail send button so you don’t accidentally click it to send your email. (After all, then the emails wouldn’t go out individually. And if you use merge tags, they won’t be filled in.)

Your connected Sheet in the Gmail compose window

But more important than the nuances — you’re set! You’ve connected your Google Sheet to your new GMass email campaign. Now let’s compose the email.

Composing Your First Email Campaign

One of the best parts of GMass is it works 100% inside Gmail — so composing your mass email is just like writing a regular email.

I whipped up a quick email here; you can write whatever you want.

Composing the basic email for this GMass quickstart guide

Adding mail merge personalization

You can use GMass for personalizing virtually every aspect of your email. (Check the bottom of this guide for all sorts of personalization features.)

For this quickstart guide, we’ll use the most basic mail merge personalization of all: Adding a first name.

In your email, go to the spot where you want to add someone’s first name. Then type a left curly brace {. A list will appear with all the column names from your Google Sheet — those are now your mail merge fields.

Your mail merge options

Choose the first name field (mine is FirstName). When you send this email by pressing the GMass button, it will fill in every recipient’s first name in that spot.

First name field is set up to merge

But what if you don’t have every first name filled in on your Google Sheet? You can add a fallback value here, which GMass will insert if that field is empty on your sheet. Add a fallback by putting a pipe | after the merge field and typing in your fallback.

Setting a fallback value

Checking the GMass settings

Your email is all set. Let’s take a quick look at the GMass settings before we send.

To pull up the settings for your campaign, click the little down arrow next to the GMass button.

Click the arrow to access the GMass campaign settings

You can tweak your campaign in lots of different ways here in the settings. At the bottom of this quickstart guide we have links to many of the different options. I won’t alter any of these for this quickstart test campaign but feel free to mess around however you’d like.

The GMass campaign settings box

Sending Your First Campaign

Everything is ready to go. Time to send this out!

And sending your campaign is as simple as clicking the GMass button.

Send your quickstart guide campaign by clicking the GMass button

GMass lets you know once it has sent the emails.

Success, you sent the GMass emails

Checking your campaign stats

You can check your campaign stats in a few different ways (here’s our page all about campaign reports).

One quick way: Click the dashboard icon next to the Gmail search box.

Click the GMass dashboard icon

That will bring up your GMass dashboard, where you can see your campaigns. You can get a quick overview of your campaign stats here.

Your stats for recent campaigns

Or click on the chart icon to see the web-based report on your campaign stats.

Click the chart icon for the web-based analytics report

That web-based report is sharable too, if you want to give access to other people to see your campaign stats.

The GMass web-based campaign report

Next Steps: Digging Into More GMass Features

Congratulations! You just sent your first personalized mass email campaign from your Gmail account.

So what’s next?

We’d recommend setting up a custom tracking domain — it’s quite possibly the best move you can make to improve your email deliverability. From there, there’s lots more to explore…

Digging deeper into GMass

From here, you can head off to send more campaigns or you can dive into more of what GMass has to offer.

Here is a massive list of helpful links to guide you through much of what GMass has to offer. We’ve put a ⭐ star next to the techniques we recommend learning about next!

Enjoy. And we wish you all the best in your email future.

Building mailing lists

Personalization

GMass campaign settings

Automation, auto follow-ups, and sequences

Reply management

List management (plus unsubscribes and bounces)

Deliverability tools

Breaking Gmail’s sending limits

Technical integrations

Reporting

And more!

GMass