The Address Book > Adding & Importing Emails

For the most part your web site will collect the members for your mailing list for you. You would usually use the Newsletter Signup Object to allow members to add themselves to your Address Book. In this page we will cover importing email addresses into the Address Book via Microsoft Excel.

PLEASE NOTE. Although sending email is a great marketing tool, your email could easily be mistaken for spam if you do not following the Communication Act, that lawfully governs the correct conduct for email communications. Basically it says that If you don't have permission from the email account holder to send email to that member, it is considered spam. Remember also that if you abuse this communication tool, its often very difficult to undo the damage you could create for your brand. Once your domain is put on a blacklist your future marketing campaigns will be ineffective. Rather just stick tot he rules.

First we need to work in Microsoft Excel. Excel, is a simple but effective tool for storing and organising data offline. In order to upload a mailing list, you will need to format the Excel file in a very specific format. The column order of the Excel file must be correct otherwise the email will not add correctly.

The following illustration indicates the column order for uploading members to the Address Book.

Download the sample file

The columns illustrated above are described in detail below:

Action Column
The Action column is the column that tells the system what to do on that particular row. The following table illustrates what the values indicate.

Import / Export

To access the import export options click the Import / Export button on the main tool bar of the Address Book.

Select the mailing list that that you would like to import the mailing list into. You can either add the new emails to and existing list, or create an empty mailing list.

Please note: SoftPage does not prevent or block duplicate emails from being added. It is possible to add an email more than once to the database. However, SoftPage does clear the duplicate emails when its sends, so the member can never receive the same mailer twice unless when sending, the same member is included in two or more batches.

After you import a list, you have to validate the members, this is because the members that you import have no validation. Each email must have a validation status in order to be sent. See more on the maintenance options here.