Introduction
When it comes to growing a website or brand, email marketing has become one of the most important ways to accumulate, keep, and engage an audience after a smart SEO-focused blog. But it remains a difficult and tedious task to put an email list together for your next newsletter.
Luckily, tools have become more efficient and effective in recent years. One such tool is Excel. While it’s been around for quite some time, people are recently discovering that Excel is the perfect partner for creating email lists and we’re here to tell you why — and how to do it yourself.
What is an Excel Spreadsheet?
Microsoft’s Excel is the most popular spreadsheet program around thanks to how simple it makes data capture, storage, and manipulation. There are currently over 750 million people using Excel in a variety of industries, including email marketing.
Back in 1996, Microsoft announced that Excel had 30 million users. That meant back in the mid-90s, more than five new users discovering Excel per minute since it was introduced in 1985.
Excel basically consists of a simple spreadsheet which can be utilized to create an organized data storage. Its simple set up and easy-to-use features makes it the perfect solution to your email marketing challenges.
How to Create an Email List from Excel
Creating an email list with the use of Excel is super simple. You can easily important addresses from Excel (XLS, XLSX) as well as addresses in a CVS format, meaning plain text separated by commas. This is the file format you will use to save your email addresses in Excel. Let’s take a closer look.
Preparation
The first thing you need to do is prepare your email list. Before uploading any information or addresses, make sure the Excel spreadsheet is organized and ready for incoming data.
Common header values are:
+ Email Address
+ Name
+ First Name
+ Last Name
Make sure all the contacts you want to include on the list are on the first page of your Excel sheet.
Save the list
Once the sheet is prepared, save your list. If you want to save it as a CSV file, click the ‘File’ tab, select ‘Save As’ from the drop-down menu, and then choose CSV as the file type.
Upload the list
If this is a new list, go to your dashboard and create a new list. Drag and drop the file from your desktop onto the Excel sheet or select to upload it.
If you are adding these contacts to an existing email list, click on the list you want to add them to and select ‘Add new subscribers’.
For each column of your subscriber data, select a field that column corresponds to (i.e. ‘Name’ or ‘Email Address’). You can also create a new list in the drop-down menu. Select ‘Finish Adding Subscribers’ when you’re done.
Check the report
Something neat that Excel does is show you a report detailing how many contacts were successfully added. It will also show you how many entries were not successfully added and explain why. So always make sure to check this over to ensure the email list is ready and up-to-date.
The benefits of using an email list template
Now that you’ve read through the process of creating an email list from Excel, you probably have a pretty good idea of how simple and effective it is for email marketing. Now the hard part is composing the email itself. Luckily, that can also be made easy with an email list template.
There’s a lot of benefits to using an email list template, since it allows you to quickly compose and schedule an email without having to start from scratch every single time. But we’ve put together some key reasons why you should implement an email list template into your email marketing strategy.
Save Time
An email list template saves you a lot of time when it comes to composing, structuring and writing an email, especially when you plan to implement graphics as well. Having a template ready means you can simply load up the template and replace it with text and photos for the next campaign.
Consistent
Luckily, customers and clients will also appreciate the uniformity as an added benefit. By using an email list template, you can easily build your brand or create a consistent voice thanks to similar styling and appearance.
Even better, an email list template ensures that vital information will always be present in each campaign. You’ll most likely have a section dedicated to certain required information, and you don’t have try and remember to include this campaign after campaign.
Enhance communication skills
The ability to easily communicate with your business’ audience is very important in this day and age. Email list templates provide an effective way to reach out to all of your customers with sales, updates, new products, or even just to thank them or let them know you appreciate them. This informal and casual interaction will keep them engaged and provide you with additional revenue.
Easier to send a group email
It’s unfortunately not too hard to forget people when creating a group email. Email list templates ensure that — as long as they remain updated — you’ll always be sending out emails to your entire list of clients, employees, friends and more.
How Can We Help
Mindspun is a modern blogging platform that understands businesses’ needs in 2020. That’s not only an easy-to-use and SEO-focused website host, but important features that help you expand your product and grow your audience. One of those features is collecting emails from interested visitors, allowing you to easily upload this list onto Excel for your next email marketing campaign.
Interested in learning more? Need some help getting started? Contact us today.
Conclusion
Email marketing is more important than ever before, with websites and companies wanting to not only expand their audience but keep them engaged and connected in 2020. Luckily, email marketing can be quite simple these days thanks to Excel’s ability to store and manage email addresses.
We hope this guide helped you even just a little bit with your next newsletter or campaign!
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