Christmas Mailing List Made Easy

Since I have received quite a few questions about my mailing list form I just sent out, I will share how I did it.

Now, I have found one the best and easiest ways to create your Christmas Mailing List. To be quite honest, it creates itself. I didn't figure this out myself, I actually found it on Scrapless Press' blog.

It is quite embarrassing every year I send out a mass email asking for people's mailing addresses. I create a spreadsheet and spend countless hours imputing information only to have lost it and have to repeat the process again the next year.

So when I stumbled upon this new idea, I was stoked and decided to try it out with just a few select friends. And I saw my list creating itself. Super cool! It is done through Google Docs. In order to do this you have to have a GMail account. If you have read about other posts you know that I love Google. I use it for everything. I wrote about Google Reader and how it rocks in one post, I have Google on my cell phone which syncs to my Google Calendar, Google contacts, and email accounts. Google also receives all of my emails (for Chic Farm and The Eggleston Family) and I can even send email from my business email right through Google. So I love Google.

What you do is sign into your Google account. If you don't have one, you can get one here. It's free. On the top left of the screen in your Gmail, you will click on Documents. Once you are in the Documents interface, click on Create New and then scroll down to Spreadsheet.Give your spreadsheet a name, and then click Save. I named mine Eggleston Family Christmas List 2009.

You will notice that the top row is already reserved for your headers. For my mailing list, I used A-I for:
A: GOOGLE RESERVES THIS FOR A TIME STAMP
B:Name
C: Address 1
D: Address 2
E: City
F: State
G: Zip
H: Cell Phone
I: Home Phone

There are also themes available or you can leave it Plain. My yahoo account didn't open the pretty image anyway:(
You don't need to add the phone numbers if you don't want to, but I thought I might as well. Your basic layout is done, now you need to go to the top menu and click on Form and scroll down to Create a form. You will now see a pop up window showing you the form fields you will use to create the spreadsheet/mailing list. You can even get fancy and change the name of each field for the form, like, "Who should I address this to?" Instead of simply just "Name". I didn't do that but you can if you'd like. Then in the form you've created there will be a button on the top that reads Email This Form. Click on this and a pop up box will appear to insert your email addresses for those you want to send it out to.

Now let's say you sent it to most of the people on your email list and remember that you forgot to send the form to someone. You go into the spreadsheet and back to Form, scroll down to Send and then follow the prompts.

And there you have it. It is that easy. Now, you can check it periodically to see who has filled the form in and start slowly addressing those envelopes! Sorry I wasn't able to even copy the pages from the Scrapless Press. Little Man put too much toilet paper in the toilet and somehow has managed to overflow the bathroom. WTH? Ooooh, I'm a lucky girl!