Email Marketing - Tips

How to Manage a Mailing List?

This part requires you to get yourself ready for doing some technical work. Until now, you have got all concepts; now it’s time to start doing some practice. Before starting your very first email campaign, you have to gather all emails addresses into a Text file or in an Excel sheet. A lot of major email marketing providers support these two formats. If you have a database of MS-Access, which consists of names, DOB, emails and zip code.

It is better to start by copying the column of Email Address to an Excel File/Text file. Once you have this information in an Excel File, then copy the Emails column into another Excel File /Text file. The main point is to only extract Email Addresses from this Database. At this point, you only have a list of email addresses. If you are using Excel, save this file in a (CSV) format, rather than XLS, XLSX, etc. If you have a Text file, save it with the (TXT) format, which is a common format of text files.
I cannot write all the steps of how could you clear the list with messy data or email formats. There might be some RAW data into your email columns like – someone has entered “Numbers, NIL, Special Characters” in the email field. So to avoid any garbage you have to implement Email Syntax Verification at the point of sign-up form or the way you collect Emails. Concerning the program, you can google it and would find a very easy JavaScript validation code to avoid any garbage submitted by the user. If you have garbage in the Excel list, you could find it with some Easy Formulas and Sorting method.
“I actually don’t perform Garbage removal and Duplicate Removal Process, My Email validation service provider actually takes no cost and removes the duplicates and garbage, while validating the emails. So I save a lot time .”
But for your learning purpose I will define below the ways −

Verify if the Column has a valid Email

Select a cell in your worksheet in Excel.
Choose Data > Validation from the menu
In the field called Allow select “Custom” option
In the Formula field type in the following code:
= SEARCH(".",A1,(SEARCH("@",A1,1))+2)

And what does this formula do? It looks for an “@” symbol first and if it finds it, it continues with the search and looks for a dot symbol. It returns the position of the dot symbol.

Duplicate Email Removal

Having got a pure clean list, now you may have some duplicate entries. There are numerous ways to find duplicates and remove them.

Select a column in your worksheet in Excel
Choose Data > Remove Duplicates
In field called Allow select “Custom” option

Once you have clicked on it, a small dialog box will appear. You will notice that the first row has automatically been deselected. The reason for this is that the “My data has headers” box is ticked. Double check the list with some other duplicate finding ways to find out if there are some leftover duplicates. If you are going to send a recipient the same email twice or more, the possible outcome is the “Unsubscribe” or ban from the ISP. You may find some detailed duplicates removing ways in this link (use it at your own discretion) − Host and Soft

How to Validate Emails

There are many software’s and online services, you may Google them. As far as my opinion is concerned, I have tried several software’s, but I have a static IP. Due to this, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail blocks the queries in bulk from the same IP. So you may have a False Positive Results. Therefore, I switched to the hosted Email validation. In the above chapters, I have posted a list of service providers, so be sure to find the one, who fits perfectly to your needs. I was in search of the cheapest and most accurate Email Validation Provider and I found Email Gang as the Cheapest one among all of them. So I decided to go with them.
Now the thing that needs to be discussed here is how you could validate the list. The scenario is same for all providers, first you have to upload the Email List File either in “.txt” Format or “.csv” Format. At this point you may have the list cleaned from garbage and duplicate email addresses. So there is no point in waiting for a better time for email validation. Just upload the file to their server through their UI, they will verify your file and return to you the Valid, Bad, Dead, Bouncy etc. emails.

Software that I Use

I don’t prefer to use too many Software tools. Simpler is better. I actually use OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine), which is a powerful tool for working with messy data, cleaning it, transforming it from one format into another, and then extending it with web services and external data. You may find short tutorials on how to work with openrefine.org.

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