The Mail Merge for Gmail add-on lets you send personalized emails via Gmail but wouldn’t it be nice if a similar solution existed for sending personalized SMS to your contacts directly from your mobile phone?

There are services, Twilio and Vonage for example, that let you send text messages programmatically to any phone number in the world. You can either build an SMS solution on top of these messaging APIs or you can take a simpler and less expensive route - build your own text sending app with Google Sheets and MIT’s App Inventor.

Before getting the implementation, let me give you a quick demo of our text-messaging app for sending SMS from any Android phone. You can send texts to any number in your country as well as global phone numbers if international texting is enabled on your phone. You’ll pay the standard text messaging rates as per your cellular plan.

Here’s my Google Sheet with the source data.

The Google Sheet can have multiple columns for SMS personalisation but the three essential columns that should be present in the sheet are Phone (for your contact’s phone number), Status (whether the SMS was sent to that phone) and Text (the personalized text message).

#android #sms #google sheets #archives