I'm wondering if there is a way to ensure merge field links are hyperlinks when sent via email using a mail merge?

I use Word, Excel and Outlook 2013 to conduct these mail merges. The troublesome part of my process is the unique link from my Excel file. Each of the 500+ people I need to email has their own unique link.

When I finish the merge and view the messages in Outlook the unique links are not hyperlinks. What I've had to do is turn off the 'Send immediately' setting in Outlook, and then manually activate each link (by putting my cursor after the link and clicking the space bar) in each email in my outbox before sending the emails out.

I've had some success with the Mail Merge Toolkit add-on in the past, but not recently. (https://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/) Recipients of these emails often reply that they cannot click on their link. It is easy enough to activate their link in my reply, but that tells me there are likely hundreds of people that do not tell me they have that issue.

I've tried these steps, well 1-8... 1. Disregarding mergefield issues for the moment, insert a hyperlink into the document in the normal way, choosing whatever 'Click Here' text you want in the 'Text to display' box.
2. Select the inserted hyperlink and press Shift-F9 to expose its field code.
3. Replace everything in the field after 'HYPERLINK' with your mergefield.
4. Select the field and press F9 to update the display.

In Word 2007 & later, you can make the display text variable also, by following these additional steps:
5. Position the cursor anywhere within the display text.
6. Insert a mergefield pointing to whatever data field you want to use for the display text (this could even be the same field as used at step 3 above).
7. Delete all of the previous display text either side of your last-inserted mergefield (note that this field will likely have updated already).
8. Execute the merge.
9. After merging to a new document, use Ctrl-A, F9 to update all fields. Without this, the mergefield hover text won’t update to the correct targets.

But the first link is the link that is pulled into each email. I assume because I cannot do step 9? Thank you in advance for any guidance.