Note: It is now possible to edit the subject and body of emails sent directly in Form Publisher. Follow the tutorial below only if you need advanced personalization (use an alias, add images etc.).

Introduction to advanced personalization with YAMM

To personalize email notifications, you can use the mail merge add-on Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) combined with Form Publisher. YAMM will let you write your own text and even add information coming right from the form, just like in this example.

Configuring Form Publisher

Open a Google Form that already has questions, then click on the menu Add-ons > Form Publisher > Get started.

Form Publisher's sidebar appears, click Select template.

Check that your markers are valid and click Next.

On the Destination folder and naming convention sidebar click:

• Keep file URL 
• Keep increment (optional) to get the incrementation in your spreadsheet
• Keep PDF copy in Drive. That is mandatory if you want YAMM to be able to retrieve the file created by Form Publisher.

That will let YAMM reuse the files generated by Form Publisher to send them by email. Then click Next.

You also need to disable the automated email from Form Publisher, as you will send the emails through YAMM and don't want people to receive multiple or duplicated emails!

On the Sharing options and notifications sidebar, in the sharing list, do not select Send  PDF. Instead, you can select Remove as you can find the PDF in the drive or the response spreadsheet.

Then click Next.

Writing the draft in Gmail

Yet Another Mail Merge lets you create your email template as a draft in Gmail, in the same way that Form Publisher enables you to use a Google Doc or a Google Sheet as a template. So go to Gmail and create a new draft. You can insert images and use all formatting options available in Gmail.

If you want to reuse data filled by the user in Google Form, you can add markers in this draft template, as you do with Form Publisher.

For more information about how Yet Another Mail Merge works, see our video tutorial.

In our example we reused the markers <<Company Name>>, <<Conference Date>> and <<Conference Time>>.

These markers are associated with answers from the form.

Installing and configuring Yet Another Mail Merge

Go back to your form and display the responses spreadsheet. Click Responses, then click the spreadsheet icon.

Note that you can now see a column named [Form Publisher] PDF URL containing the generated PDF file's links.

To install Yet Another Mail Merge from this spreadsheet, click on Add-ons > Get add-ons.

Then type Yet Another Mail Merge in the search bar and install it.

Once installed,  click Add-ons > Yet Another Mail Merge > Configure form submission notifications.

A sidebar appears to let you configure the mail merge process.

There are two options:

Option 1: Notify one or more addresses of all responses

The email will be sent to the address(es) you put in the Recipients field of the Gmail draft.

Option 2: Notify address submitted by the form

The emails will be sent to the addresses submitted within the form. In that case, leave the recipients field empty in the Gmail draft, and select the recipients' email addresses column from your responses spreadsheet.

In both cases, check the option Wait until a specific column is filled before sending the email, and select the PDF column. This option makes sure Form Publisher completed the process, and that the PDF has been correctly generated before sending the email.

When you have chosen which option to use click Save.

Note: If you have existing data in this spreadsheet, Yet Another Mail Merge will only send emails for new responses/form submissions. If you want to send your emails to the existing recipients, delete the 0 from the Merge status column, then open Configure form submission notifications again to relaunch it. You can close it after that.

The resulting notification

All done! You can try to submit a new form response and take a look at the email sent.

A new line is added, and the Merge status column has been updated.

Other option/workflow: Control the PDF generated before sending the email

Yet Another Mail Merge can either send emails right after a file has been generated by Form Publisher automatically, or you can manually send those emails later, after reviewing the PDFs created.

To do the above, uncheck both options from the form submission sidebar and click Save.

Submit a new form response and start your mail merge.