Everything You Need To Know About Mailing Lists

One of the very first things you need to do before sending your emails is to have someone to send to!

We have created a Checklist (available here) to help you put steps in place to gain as many new subscribers as possible. However for those of you that already have your subscribers ready, then the first step to importing them into your GraphicMail account is to create a mailing list. This will allow you to group your subscribers so you can then send to them all in one go. This list must be opt-in which means all of the recipients on your list have given their consent to receive your emails. Please note, using a bought list will not be accepted by GraphicMail as it contravenes the UK law.

There are several ways of importing contacts into a mailing list:
1) You can add contacts by copying and pasting them into your GraphicMail account
2) Import your list from an online account such as Gmail, Yahoo or sync from Outlook Desktop
3) You can easily import an Excel spreadsheet that’s been previously created
4) Alternatively you can sync your contacts from cloud applications using OneSaas.

Although we provide 4 options, uploading your contacts via an excel spreadsheet is the most popular so we are going to give some additional guidance to help make sure importing your contacts this way can be done as quickly as possible. When importing your excel spreadsheet it's best to ensure the following:

1.The name of the file: When looking to import your list you need to check that the name of your file doesn’t contain any spaces between the characters or any symbols. Keep it short and save it as a .CVS file (comma delimited) file type as that is the quickest and easiest way for the file to be imported.
2.The number of columns: It's important to keep in mind the maximum number of columns allowed is 25. Each detail, such as the email address, title, firstname, etc should be in a separate column.
3.The data provided: The data in each column should not exceed 50 characters in order to be able to upload your list into your GraphicMail account.
4. Keep it simple: Avoid dropdown menus and formulas in your spreadsheets.

Once you’ve imported your contacts they will be placed in your selected mailing list ready to be used. For those of you that have imported additional information about your subscribers then we suggest you make use of our Segmentation tool as that allows you to send your email marketing campaigns to a specific audience. You can easily set rules based on the information you have about your subscribers allowing you to target an audience you would like to send to such as only 'males within Newcastle', 'users that have purchased a product in the last 48 hours' and more.

You can also take advantage of the personalisation feature available within the editor and personalise your emails with your client’s data. If you'd like to learn more about this then you can read our previous blog to “Learn how to boost your Email Marketing campaigns”.

Hopefully you can now easily import your current subscribers and continue your efforts to gain more as having opt-in subscribers and up-to-date information relating to them is essential for you to create personalised, targeted and successful Email Marketing campaigns.