Asking the experts! Mailing list organization question!

HI ALL! Since you guys are the pros, please indulge me while I ask a question that i'm sure one of you can answer. I have posted and then reposted (by way of further explanation, since I couldn't seem to get the question I was asking clearly understood or answered) what I think is a question that is at the very heart of email marketing and would be of interest to many others. Nobody is really responding with anything that answers the question. I have it over in the group, "Email Marketing for Beginners" and it is called "How to "store" your mailing lists". It seems to me your mailing list and the customer data that you have collected is incredibly valuable, yet I just can't seem to find out how to organize and "store" this valuable asset. I would be forever indebted to the generous soul who can give me guidance!!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!

Tags: customer, data, list, mailing, organization, storage

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Permalink Reply by JP Collins on March 26, 2009 at 9:06pm: I consult for the San Francisco Small Business Development Center and have my own email marketing clients and what I tell them is to start with the basics. Put it all into a spread sheet. Excel or whatever. From there you can export it to csv or tab delimited which can be uploaded to your VR account. However, that format can be exported into a more robust database like FileMaker or up to a Contact Management System like SalesForce or Highrise HQ.

I often keep my lists in different spreadsheets for specific types of clients organized by the month and year or the campaign. This is all on my hard drive which gets backed up. I can export those lists into my CMS and into VR. That way if I do need to locate a name or an address I can search on my VR lists, my CMS and if I need to on my hard drive.

It sounds a little cumbersome but if you organize your directories and files properly, it keeps your data in order. I'm sure there are other ways of doing this but this is what I've found works with my workflow and it often works for a lot of the sole proprietors I talk to.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Whirlingturban on March 26, 2009 at 11:32pm: THANK YOU!!!!! I was thinking about using Excel. We already put our lists in Quickbooks Customer Manager but it absolutely cannot handle the data volume. We are stuck with QBCM for now for our customer management. But we are going to have to take the mailing lists only and do something else with them, and I didn't want to make another mistake, and enter a bunch more data in something that I would just find out was a bad idea. So, again, I just super appreciate you advice!!!!

I am going to post this over in the Email Marketing for Beginners group, since I myself had such a hard time getting advice about this. I hope it will help others.

THANKS AGAIN!!!!

Katherine in Bali; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Paul Bee on September 4, 2009 at 1:10pm: I would agree with Mr Collins that organisation is key.

For info, I think the older versions of Excel cannot open up more than 63 or 65 thousand lines of data/addresses. So if your mailing list is larger than this and you are using older versions of this software, (or you collaborate with colleagues who are not up to date with theirs), you should save the file as a .csv (Comma separated values) or tab delimited, and open it with simple editor such as Notepad when examining it as an exported list (outside of your emailing software).

Of course it is less easy to swap columns around or add segments designations/new columns of your list outside of Excel, but of course this may all be hypothetical if your company operates with address lists under 60K.; ▶ Reply to This