Email List Marketing Address Import How To

When many people start to do email marketing, they face a problem of getting customer information so called email list inside of an email marketing software they use. The simplest way here is to add all customers in an email marketing software with the use of the Add command by typing all information with hands. Ouch! This is a good way of getting blisters on your fingers, and believe me, I actually saw people doing this weird stuff. Since you need data, not blisters, let’s talk about data export and import.

Before you started to use email marketing software, you used simple email clients to communicate with your customers and most likely, you have your email lists in different black boxes such as address books including Microsoft Address Book and Apple Address Book, in Microsoft Excel XLS spreadsheets, databases or text files of various formats. Another black box you have to deal with is email marketing software. Since you need to move your email list from one black box to another it becomes very confusing. I have heard it many times: “What the hell am I supposed to do to move my friggin email list from one black box to another?”. Some people even do unusual things like changing file extensions from XLS or DOC to a whatever type the email marketing software uses, or selecting and copying everything in a spreadsheet to the pasteboard and pasting it to the email marketing software. After destroying their computers they say: “What is the name of that moron who made this friggin software?”

Do not blame developers, they did it right. You can easily transfer data between two black boxes just by using temporary plain-text files in one of the standard formats: tab-delimited file format or CSV file format. Simply export your email list from the first black box to a pre-formatted plain text file (CSV or tab-delimited) and then import it in the second black box. CSV file format and tab-delimited file format are used in almost all software products including email marketing software products as an import and export options.

Address book export and address book import. The most common source of email addresses is address book. No matter what you use Windows Address Book on Windows or Apple Address Book on Mac, you have an option to export your email addresses to a plain text file having CSV file format or tab-delimited file format. Even if your address book cannot export your addresses in plain text format, you email list distribution software will do it for you. Many email list distribution software products support address book import and address book export. To perform address book export, you need to use the File-Export command in address book. To perform address book import, you need to use the File-Import command in address book.

How to import XLS spreadsheet made in Microsoft Excel. Open XLS file in Excel and save it as a plain-text file in CSV file format or in tab-delimited file format using the File-SaveAs command. If you need to edit an email list stored as plain text in Excel before importing it in en email marketing software, you need to perform some sort of CSV to XLS or tab-delimited to XLS conversion. To import CSV or tab-delimited file in Microsoft Excel you need to perform the File-Open command and specify the file format as plain-text.

Now about import from databases. If you store customer information in a database such as Oracle, IBM DB2 or MySQL, you can easily export email list from it by using the export feature. All database systems can export data to plain-text files in CSV and tab-delimited formats. You should simply use the database exporter in your database system to get a CSV or tab-delimited file with your email list.

Import from other file formats. The rule of thumb here is to convert the file you currently have to a plain text file. This plain text file then can be further converted to a csv or tab-delimited file, which in turn can be imported in email list distribution software. Microsoft DOC and XLS files should be saved as plain text files using the File-SaveAs command. Most of software products allow you to export or save their native file formats as plain-text files. Do not try to simply change file extension from DOC or XLS to TXT. This is not going to work. DOC and XLS files are actually binary files that appear as text only when you open them in Microsoft Office.

Once you get a plain-text file with your email distribution list in csv file format or in tab-delimited file format, you can import it in your email list distribution software. All you have to do at this point is to use the File-Import command to initiate import and then simply follow the import wizard steps. This way you will convert csv file or tab-delimited file into another file format your email list distribution software supports. In other words you will get your email distribution list in your email list distribution software.