Email marketing has come a long way in recent years. While the fundamental goals and principles remain the same, much has changed. For example, the tools of the trade have become much more efficient and effective.
One tool from the past that still exists (for a while, at least) is the Excel spreadsheet. It has become synonymous with data capture and storage.
What is an Excel spreadsheet?
Microsoft Excel is the most popular spreadsheet program and was designed to facilitate capture, storage and handling. These qualities have made Excel an invaluable tool in many industries, including email marketing.
How do you measure the value of Excel?
The value of any tool is measured easily by the number of its adopters and its ability to make life easier. Excel meets both criteria.
Excel is used by approximately 800 million users worldwide.
Due to its ease of use and functionality, Excel is has become one of the most widely used tools in email marketing, in terms of collecting and storing email addresses.
What happens when you want to build an email list from Excel?
How to build an email list from Excel
Building an email list from Excel is really simple, especially if you’re a Campaign Monitor customer, because you can easily import addresses from Excel ( XLS, XLSX) and those that are formatted using a comma-separated values (CSV) format.
“CSV” simply means tabular data that is saved as plain text but is separated by commas. This is the file format you use to store your email addresses in Excel.
Prepare Your Email List
The first step in creating your email list from Excel is prepare your list, which means you use a header row to define the content in each column of your spreadsheet. Common header values accepted by most email service providers include (but are not limited to) “Email”, “Email Address”, “First Name”, “First Name”, and “Last Name”.
You’ll also need to make sure that all the contacts you want to include on your list are on the first page of your Excel sheet.
Save your list
Next , save your list as you normally would. You can also save it as a CSV file if you want. To do this, click the “File” tab, select “Save As” and select CSV as the file type.
Upload Your List
To upload your list, simply go to to your board and create a new list (if you’re not adding them to an existing list). To add the contacts in your Excel file to your list, you can either drag and drop the file from your desktop or click the option to upload it.
If you are adding the contacts to an existing list, you simply need to click on the list you want to add them to and select “Add New Subscribers”.
Once you’ve uploaded your file, match the columns to the subscriber fields:
Source: Campaign Monitor
When you’re done, click “Finish adding subscribers.”
View the report
After uploading your excel file, you will receive a report detailing how many contacts were successfully added. It will also show you how many were unsuccessful and the reasons why.
Does it really matter?
Knowing how to build an email list from Excel is definitely something you should know how to do. . There are many situations in which you may receive a contact list that has been saved as an Excel file, and knowing how to create a list from that file is critical.
Managing email lists requires that you be aware of many list building and management tricks.
Now what?
Now that you know how to build an email list from Excel, go ahead and extract those files of Excel that you have been using. fearing to work on It only takes a few minutes to build an email list out of them.
Need more list management tips? Check out our article on list management tools that will make your life easier.
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