What options are available with a mail merge program

Composer: Definitely the most familiar name in document creation on the AppExchange, Conga Composer has been in the AppExchange Top 10 for eight years straight. And for good reason too, when it comes to available features and flexibility, Composer is one of the most comprehensive solutions available. Whether you need to generate a single tax letter, or create & email out PDFs of end of year giving summaries to every donor in your organization, Composer can handle it seamlessly. It can handle multiple file formats and works in both PC & Mac environments. It can create and email out documents based on workflow rules for a small fee. Want to automatically email out a PDF of a personalized event invitation to anyone in Chicago who signs up for your newsletter or donates online? No problem.

While Composer is one of the most powerful mail merge products, it comes with a somewhat heftier price tag. With a 33% discount to non-profits bringing the per user cost down to $120 per year, a five-user minimum subscription comes to $600 a year.   Recent enhancements to the Composer Template Builder and a brand new Solution Manager utility have made it easier than ever for administrators to get started.

If you’re an organization with lots of users creating large mail merges on a regular basis, Conga Composer stands out as the best option.

 The other option when your organization needs the full set of mass mail capabilities, Drawloop’s LOOPlus is able to match Conga Composer feature to feature. It’s got a couple extra tricks up its sleeve, such as automatically creating new records (not just tasks) in Salesforce after completing a mail merge or pushing newly created documents onto an FTP server or Box.net account. Also, when it came to creating new templates, I found it to be more user friendly than Composer. Interestingly, choosing records for mass merges is done in list views rather than through reports (Note that LOOPlus allows you to define multiple cross-object relationships, so there’s no real loss in functionality versus using reports). While this may lead to some duplication of reports, it allows for more granular control of who to include in the merge.

(UPDATE: New Features Non Profit Focus: Batch processing visibility so you can see completed and errors while batch processing,  Mass Merge from list view hasn’t changed but they have added the ability to Mass Merge from a Salesforce report thus removing the barrier of 200 records from a list view.)

Drawloop’s pricing model is both a strength as well as a weakness. While the annual per user cost is a bit higher at $140, Drawloop will waive the minimum user requirement of five down to one for nonprofits. This keeps the minimum annual cost down $140. Unfortunately, there is an additional fee when using the mass merge features of $0.20 per DDP created (DDP, or Dynamic Document Packages, Drawloop’s esoteric term for documents). If you’re creating a lot of mass merges, this can add up quickly and negate any savings made on user licenses.

If your organization needs a competitive mail merge solution for only one or two Salesforce users and won’t be creating large amounts of mass merges on a regular basis, Drawloop’s LOOPlus will be a perfect fit.

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