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 got into email marketing, you used simple email clients to communicate with your customers therefore most likely, you have information about your customers in different address books such as Microsoft Address Book or Apple Address Book, in Microsoft Excel XLS spreadsheets, databases or text files of various formats. For you all these containers are just black boxes including email marketing software you need to move your email list to. This raises a question: “What the hell am I supposed to do to move my friggin email list from one black box to another?”. I saw people doing really weird stuff 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 crashing their computers several times in a row they were saying: “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.
Let’s deal with address book export and address book import. Both Windows Address Book and Apple Address Book allow you to export email addresses to a plain text file in CSV file format or in tab-delimited file format. Email marketing software products can also import email addresses form address books directly. If you want to perform address book export, you should use the File-Export command in address book. If you want to perform address book import, you should use the File-Import command in address book.
Importing XLS spreadsheet made in Microsoft Excel. Open XLS file in Microsoft Excel and save it as a plain-text file in CSV file format or in tab-delimited file format using the File-SaveAs command. To open any CSV or tab-delimited file in Microsoft Excel, perform CSV to XLS or tab-delimited to XLS conversion. To achieve that use the File-Open command in Excel 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.
How to import email lists from other file formats. First, convert the file you currently have to plain text. In most of the cases you can save the original file as CSV or tab-delimited file. If not, use Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers to pre-format it and save it as CSV or tab-delimited file. Microsoft DOC and XLS files should be saved as plain text files using the File-SaveAs command. Many software products allow you to save their native file formats as plain-text files.
After exporting your data to a plain text file in CSV file format or in tab-delimited file format, you can import it in your email marketing software. Use the File-Import command in your email marketing software to initiate import and then just follow the import wizard steps.