Let’s assume you have a team of people that you regularly communicate with via email. And this team involves about 10 people.

What you would normally do when composing a new email is to type each team member’s email one by one. This can be so time consuming depending on the number of people in the team. You could even end up typing an incorrect email.

So in today’s post I will show you how you can leverage Google Contact Group so you don’t have to ever type a team member’s email manually again, each time you’re composing a new email.

What are Contact Groups ?

But before we dive into using Contact Groups, you might be wondering what they are and what they do.

Well, this is a feature that lets you create, organize and manage personal mailing lists which you can later use to quickly send emails to groups of people you contact often without having to individually enter their emails.

How do they work?

So the way Google Contacts work is, you create a contact group in Gmail then you add a list of contacts to it then you simply choose this group whenever you’re composing a new email in Gmail.

We dive deeper into this in our next section as I’ll show you how you actually use this amazing feature.

How to use Google Contact Groups

Let me share with you how I personally use Google Contact Groups. Well, because I help businesses switch to Google Workspace, this means interacting with clients most of the time, and usually each client has an IT team.

So each time I’m composing an email to a client, instead of typing the team member’s email one by one, I usually create a contact group with a client’s name then add the entire team to that group.

And whenever I’m composing an email to a client, I simply type the client’s group name and bang!, all the emails of the people in that group are automatically populated and I’m ready to compose and send my email just like that.

This might not be the same exact scenario with you but, it’s likely similar. So with that being said, let me now show you how you actually use Contact Groups.

Accessing Contact Groups

One way to access Google contact group is via Gmail.

While inside your Gmail inbox, click on “Mail” then “Contacts” from the drop-down menu list as you can see in the screenshot below.

The other way to access contacts page is by directly going to http://contacts.google.com or by clicking on Google Contacts. This should take you to a page similar to screenshot below.

Creating new Contact Group aka Label

So let’s go ahead and create our new contact group. Note that, in the new Google’s contact page, this has been changed to “Label” so we’ll be using the term “Label” to mean “Contact Group“.

To create a new label click on “Label” from the left hand menu then type in the label name. This is the name you’ll type in the “To” field while composing new email.

In my case, I’ll create a new label called “ABC Client” as you can see in the screenshot below. Having typed your preferred label name, click OK to save your new label.

Creating new contact

Next, we’ll create the contacts we’ll be adding to our new label we just created. If you already have the contacts you would want to add to the group added to Google contacts, you may skip this step.

To create a new contact just click on the “+” icon at the button of the page. Then in the new form that pops up, type in your contact’s details.

Then after filling in the form, click “Save”.

Repeat this to add another contact to your contacts list.

Sometimes you have your own internal team that you would want to CC whenever you send an email to a client for instance.

In this case you can go ahead create another label with contacts of your internal team which you will include in the “CC” field.

So, I will create another new label called “Internal” then add in my internal team’s email contacts.

Adding contacts to a label

So now that we’ve created our contacts, it’s time to add contacts to our new labels we created earlier.

So adding contacts to a label is as easy as:

1. First, make sure you’re on “Contacts” page.
2. Then hover your cursor over a contact that you’d want to add to a label and click on a square box against it to check it. Check all the contacts you wish to add to a label.
3. Next click on the label icon as you can see in the screenshot above.
4. Finally, click on the label you want to add the contacts to.

Repeat these steps to add contacts to another label. In my case I add another list of contacts to my “internal” label which is my internal team.

Composing new email using contact groups

Now that we’ve created our labels, created our new contacts and added contacts to their respective labels, what more? It’s time to now compose our first email leveraging the power of Google contacts groups.

Head over to Gmail and compose a new email as you would normally do.

However, this time in the “To” field, instead of typing emails one by one, just type label name you just create “ABC Client’ in my case.

Then as you type a label or group name, you notice that even before you finish typing a label name, Gmail is automatically suggesting you the label name, just click on the label name you want to add then Gmail will automatically populate the “To” field with the emails of those people in that specific label or group if you like.

You can do this for the “CC” field as well. Just type “Internal” for my case and just like that I have my entire internal team’s email address added like magic!

Final Remarks

So you just saved yourself a bunch of time. From now on, whenever you’re composing a new email you’ll just have to type a group’s label name and head over to typing your email without wasting time trying to type emails one at time.

By the way, another handy way to save time is by creating templates in Gmail. This saves you a lot of time especially if you send emails with similar content.

I hope you’ve been able to find this helpful. Feel free to leave your questions and comments below and I’m more than glad to help.