Setting up E-mail Group Distribution Lists in Microsoft Outlook and Gmail

All right. Hi everybody, Randall F. Dean here, Totally Obsessed Time Management Guy, email sanity expert. And as you can see, a little bit of a casual day in the office. But I wanted to put together a quick YouTube video on one of the most commonly asked questions that I have when I'm leading my live programs and/or webinar programs, which is how do you build a group distribution list, meaning a group email list that way you don't have to type in everybody's name every time you send an email out to your team or your group. And it's actually a pretty easy process in both Outlook and Gmail. Now, I actually built a video on this topic like 10 years ago, uh, definitely time to update because they've sort of changed it, but I think they've actually made it a bit easier to use. So let's go in and talk about how to do this. So I'm going to pop out of here, I'm going to pop into my Microsoft Outlook. Now, as you can see I've sort of truncated the screen here, and the reason that I did that is I was sort of trying to protect people's private information. But all you need to do is click on the People tab or the little icon at the bottom of your screen that looks like this. That's your contacts database. And you click in there and then see this button right here? It's called New Contact Group. Click on this. And when you click on this, what you're going to first do is want to come up with a name for this group. And I'm going to make a name called, um, Every Randy Email 4, because I actually have 4 different email addresses. And so I'm just going to use myself as the, as the contact. So this is the name of the group. And now you can come up and hit Add Members. Now, first thing I'll do is I'll see if I've got any of these people in my database already, which hopefully I do. So I'll hit From Outlook Contacts, and let me just put randy@, and I'm going to hit Go. And oh, look at that, There's both my Gmail and my business account. So let's do the Gmail account and, um, double-click on it. It adds it to members and you hit OK. And let's do it again. Add members, same exact process.

Do this for each person.

Randy at— and now I'm going to take my Timelyman and put that one in and hit OK. And as you can see, so now I've added both my Timelyman and my Randy F. Dean. Wait a minute, let's add another member. Let's do this one from Outlook contacts once again. Timelyman@outlook.com. I think I've got that one up there.

Let's hit Go.

Yep, there's that one. Let's double-click on that and add that in. Hey, let's do a random one as a new email contact. Display name, Randy— if I can type—

Yahoo.

Janna Randy Dean.

@yahoo.com.

And I'm going to say— notice that it gives you the option to add a new email into your contacts. I think this might already be in there. Let's see what happens. Yep, see, it's already in there, so I'm not going to make any changes. I'm just going to hit update, and now that one is part of the list too. Now this is a very important step. Remember the name of the group, Every Randy Email For. Okay, so that's the name of the group. And then don't just close this, you got to hit Save and Close, because if you don't hit Save and Close, the group doesn't get created. So now hit Save and Close. Now let's, uh, go to my mail. I want to show you what I just did. Let's open this thing up a little bit so you can see it a little bit better, and let's hit New Email. And I'm going to type in every— look at that— Every Randy Email For. See, I've already played around with this, so I made one, but I'm going to do this one. And if I click on this, what's interesting is now it's this in. Now if you click the little plus right here, check this out, it will show you who the members are. Now let's click on the plus real quick, and notice if you expand the list, it'll replace the list with its members. That way, if you don't want to have the name every Randy email for in your, um, to field, you can actually click on the little plus and hit OK, and it replaces it with the actual names and emails of the people that you're sending it to. That simple and easy.

But now let's try a little something here. This is sort of cool.

Uh, let's not save the changes. Let's go into my calendar and make a new meeting. I just want to show you, this is cool. You come down here to Required, type in every— there it is. Look at this.

You can also use this for your calendar invites to very quickly and easily send them a meeting request too.

I would play around with this.

You might be able to use it in some other places also.

But I think the two that are most common is being able to send a quick group email or being able to send a quick group meeting request.

Now, coming out of this, let's close this. I'm not going to save changes. Let's go into Gmail.

Now, in Gmail, a little bit different process, but it works just about as easily. Come up here to Compose. You don't start typing in the email names. You instead hover your mouse over the To or the CC or the BCC. Any of those will work.

Click.

And when you click on the 2, um, let's close that.

Uh, when you click on the 2, you come up here to Search Contacts.

And, um, what you're going to want to do—

I'm going to switch this down to a list that doesn't have anything in it just to keep the screen clear.

And, uh, what I want to do is search for contacts.

I'm going to do the same thing again, Randy at, and let's do a search. Let's see what it brings up. Oh, found these 3. Look at email, Gmail, outlook. Hey, that's most of them. I'm gonna hit Select All.

Now when you hit Select All— now by the way, little thing, you might have to search for each one of your people individually out of your contact database, and if they're not there, you might need to add them in before you do this step.

You're gonna want to click the checkbox, and then what you do is you come up here and click Manage Labels. When you click Manage Labels, look, I've already played around with this. I've already created a label called All My Randys and Every Randy. Let's create create a new label called Every Randy— or All Randy For— that's a better one— All Randys For. So I'm just going to hit Save, and now by doing that, I've created the label for this contact. Now let's jump out of here. Let's close this.

Now I'll go back into here again.

Let's click on To, and inside of click on To, what I want to do is do All Randy, and let's do a search. Notice that it brought up all of my different Randys here, and so I can quickly select all and do an insert this way. Or the other option that I could have is to actually click on the To field, and, um, let's go into all Randy You'll see that I've got the search results in here. What I can do is come to all my Randys right here and click on that. That's going to bring up the list. What you can do here is then you can click Select All and Insert. You can do it by both the name or the label. Let's try that once again so you understand what I'm saying here. I did it one way through the search, but the other way that you can do it is click on the To field. Once you've created it, go into My Contacts where you've got your labels, All Contacts, All Randys 4. Let's click on that one. Select All. This is the step. You make the label, you go into your contacts, into the label, you select all people that are in your group, and hit Insert, and it'll automatically insert them. And wait, let's try something here. Let's try it again. We did it in the first one. Let's do it on this one. Let's pop out to my Google Calendar and let's create a new calendar item. And what I want to do is, uh, first I want to make more options and come up here to Add Guests. And when I do Add Guests, I think this might work also. Let's type in all my— yep, there it is, all my Randys. Click that in, boom, look, it's added in the people that you can add to the meeting. This same capability of being able to use it for— yeah, I'm going to leave the site. The same capability for what you're trying to do in both Outlook and Gmail is available. Following these slightly different processes, by the way, if I did that a little quick, I'd recommend going back to the start of this video and doing the pause at each particular step and following the steps so that you can build your lists in either Outlook or Gmail. But by doing this, you can set it up that you can very quickly not have to type everybody's name in, select the group, either in Outlook or Gmail the way that I showed you, and populate them into either a new email or a new calendar item automatically. Save yourself a ton of time. Now, I also wanted to take advantage of this to announce something new. I am getting close to another subscriber milestone on my YouTube channel. And I've obviously been building out all of my online full-length programs those of you that have been following me. So what I've done is I've made a new Patreon page. This is a tool that many people like me that are content creators, you know, I'm doing my videos both in short and long form. I'm also, you know, writing blogs, creating my e-newsletter, all this kind of stuff. If you've been sort of following me and you enjoy this kind of content, one way that you can help me do this is by supporting my Patreon channel. And you saw the link that was there. I'll put it in the comments below this video also. Basically, I've created a Patreon page where you can basically become a member and support my efforts to create more content like this. Now, one of the things that I'm hoping to do is build a lot more of these YouTube quick tip videos, but I'm also planning to build out some more online PDF type documents like I've created for my Taming the Email Beast program. Also, you know, more of my full-length type programs. And what I'm going to do, which is sort of interesting, is I'm actually going to take some of my longer videos and I'm going to post them in a way that I can only share them with my Patreon supporters. So that way I've got some bonus content that's out there that I can provide you that my regular YouTube subscribers won't be able to get access to. I've created several different tiers, and you can go in and see the tiers. These 3 are for individual supporters, and, uh, the next 3 levels are actually for small businesses to the mid to large size businesses and ways that they can actually utilize this on a subscription model to help them with their ongoing training and development needs for their professional staff. Might be a real good model for those companies that have already worked with me in the past and want to make sure that this stuff sticks. So just wanted to share that with you. Like I said, I'll have the link to the Patreon page down here, but I, you know, go check it out, take a look. If you're interested, would love to have you be a supporter. And one thing I'd like to ask too, since this is new, take a look at what I'm offering and send me ideas if you see something there that you think would be really valuable that maybe I should consider adding in. I've tried to make them value-loaded offers that are worth way more than what I'm charging, but take a look at it. One thing I will say is if you prefer to just do the one-offs, I will also give you the link to my e-learning academy where you can just purchase programs one at a time as you need. So if you prefer to just have one program and do it your way, you can do it that way, the old traditional way. Or you can do the Patreon thing. So, with that, I'm going to say thank you for your time. I hope that this has been a very useful use of your time. If you'd like, once again, to find out a little bit more about me and my programs, go visit my regular website randy@randalldean.com. I'm going to cover myself up right there. Hi everybody. And once again, if you like this video, please subscribe to the channel. Hit the like button. Maybe turn on the notifications to know when new ones are coming in. Although, if you become a Patreon member, you're going to get first access to that. And if you'd like to get my series of productivity PDF tip sheets on time, email, related tech management, device usage, things like that, just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you a whole slew of little electronic PDF tip sheets that will give you tips on how to better manage your stuff. And some of them link through directly to my YouTube channel. Imagine that. All right. Thanks, everybody. Hope you had fun today. Good luck with your group emails.