How to Send Reminder Emails Based on Date in Google Sheets

How to send automatic emails to your contacts based on pre-scheduled dates specified in a Google Sheet. Use it for sending reminder email/ Deadline reminder/ Meeting Invitation when a due date is reached.

If you run a company or you are in such position in an organization where you have thousands of clients across the globe to be managed through emails, or send reminders time to time, or have to send deadline reminders. It’s cumbersome job to send individual mails or track record of it, which is again a huge task to handle.

In such situation, we wish to have some automated function or application/ process which make your task easier.

Send Automatic Emails with Google Sheets

Let’s say, Paul is looking for a reminder system that will automatically send an email notification/meeting invitation to their colleague when their per-scheduled are coming up in next few days. Let’s see how he can build such a workflow in 10 minutes with the help of Mail Merge for Gmail.

The idea is simple.

We have the customer data in a Google Sheet or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The “Meeting Date” column in the spreadsheet contains the date when the meeting is to be happen at mentioned “Location”. We set up a workflow matrix that runs in the background and monitors the mail scheduled date. If there’s any meeting coming up & you want to send the invitation mail in advance from the meeting scheduled date, an automatic email reminder is sent to the Colleague at the particular location as per the workflow matrix maintained by you.

Create the Reminder Email Workflow

To get started, install the Mail Merge for Gmail add-on for Google Sheets. If you have never used the merge add-on earlier, please go through Mail Merge Tool for a quick overview.

Next, create a new Google Sheet and choose Add-ons > Mail Merge with Attachments > Create Merge Template.

Here you can import contacts from Google contacts, or Mailchimp list or If you have your customer data in an Excel sheet, you can easily import the records into this Google sheet using the File > Import menu.

You can add required data columns e.g. Location, Meeting Date etc. as per your requirements.

Open the Gmail website, compose a new email message that will be the reminder template and save it in your drafts folder. The email body and subject can include column titles, enclosed inside double-curly braces and these will be replaced with actual values from the Google Sheet when the email is sent.

Auto Expiry Reminder Email

Here’s how are sample reminder email template looks like. You can also include emojis, images, and file attachments in your email drafts.

Now that our Contact matrix data is ready to be merged, go to the Add-ons menu in the sheet and choose Configure Mail Merge.

Here follow the step-by-step wizard to add your sender’s name and also specify addresses that you wish to CC/BCC in every merged message.

In the Create Email Template section, choose “Use a Gmail Draft” and select the draft template that you’ve created in the previous step.

Send Date-based Reminder Emails/Pre-Scheduled Meeting Invitation

Expand the “Send Email Campaign” section and choose “Send a Test Email” to preview your message before it gets sent to external users. If all looks good, choose “Run Mail Merge” and hit “Go”.

That’s it. Mail Merge will setup a background task that will continuously run in the background and whenever a Meeting Date is due to expire; an email reminder is automatically sent to the Colleague based on the date in the Scheduled Date column.

You can check the “Mail Merge Logs” sheet to track progress and a copy of all emails will also be saved in your Gmail Sent Items folder.

The reminder emails are sent based on the time zone of your spreadsheet. If you would like to send emails in a different time zone, go to the File menu inside Google Sheet, choose Spreadsheet Settings, and update the time zone.

You can also make use of Filters in Google Sheets to send automatic emails to rows that meet specific criteria - when the country is “India” or when a cell value contains “Follow-up” and so on.

The same date-based workflow can be utilized to automate email sending in multiple scenarios like sending personalized wishes on birthdays and anniversaries, domain renewal reminders, fee payment reminders, appointments, and more.

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