Emailing via a CSV file

Peerzy · 9 Feb 2011 at 11:58

Right, bit of a tricky one. I'm helping out a friend who owns a business - he sells stuff and has a database of his customers, in the program he uses for the database (industry specific) he can click print letter and it prints letters for all his customers advising them to come him and then he pops in his own for sale leaflets and gets his PA to post them all.

More and more of his trade is done through emailing now so he can extract the customer details to a CSV file and wants to know how he can go about automating something that will take the email address, let him add an attachment, have type an email and send it to all the addresses?

He's also worried spam filters might start to filter him out as he will be sending about 250 emails a month.

Any help/programs appreciated.

Thanks

Just to clarify: The CSV file has all the customer details so we only need to use the email address - if possible to use the Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss NAME would be brilliant.

He said he will export 1 month at a time, so any customers who last visited him in say last March, will be exported and have an email sent reminding them to come visit him his March.

Peerzy · 9 Feb 2011 at 12:53

Brilliant, he uses Outlook on other PC's for other email accounts but I'm not sure what he uses on this one. Either way he will be happy to use Outlook for this process if possible as he knows the basics of it.

I'm waiting for him to email me the CSV file as my first thought was run it through some sort of program and remove the bits we don't need so it just became a list of email addresses and then somehow get that into Outlook.

Send Personally looks good but surely there are free tools that do this? It doesn't matter if I have to do any initial setup - either way I'll suggest it to him.

Peerzy · 9 Feb 2011 at 13:52

He uses Outlook on his personal workstation for his email account, plus webmail (GMail) for all the Google calender stuff. They all use MS Word, Excel etc... so it's something they know how to use. I'll have a look at the CSV file when it arrives and see what data it contains.

I agree that £16 isn't a lot for a program that should help his business, was just looking for free alternatives - if not I'll suggest he gets that. If it does the job I'm sure he will be happy.

Peerzy · 10 Feb 2011 at 08:43

Little bump as I got the CSV file today.

Code:

account accounttype name address1 address2 town county postcode country vatnumber custtype defaultdoc analysis rep vatinc oncost labourrate onstop apptype pricecode remindertype uniqueid account1 acctype name1 phone mobile fax email defaultcontact

The field I need to extract is 'email' and 'name' or maybe 'name1' for a contact. Sometimes there is no email address so it is just left blank.

Would this be easy to convert into an Outlook csv file via some sort of batch file?

Peerzy · 10 Feb 2011 at 09:06

edscdk said:
you cannot control the recipients spam filter, though obviously having viagra drugs and teen wants to meet you in the body text would make it more likley to be marked as spam... also no words or jsut an attachment would be likley marked as spam...

I doubt 250 a month is going to reach any mail senders limit, gmail free accounts can send (I think) 500 a day or 1000 if you sign up to a £35 a year account...

if he wants to send out a mail shot once a month type thing you can stick the address' in excel and use the saved sheet as a source to do an outlook email shot... (probably can be done straight from the CSV as well)

Thanks - wasn't sure on the spam filter but guessed it wouldn't be too much of an issue.

The bottom paragraph is exactly what he wants to do, I don't think he wants to save all of these contacts into his Outlook, as he has a different list to do each month.

He just wants to 'email shot' however many customers it is saying "Hey you've not been in for an MOT yet and we did yours 11 months ago" with a "plus look at the stuff we've got for sale in this pdf", each month he'll export the details for the next months customers and fire off the email.

Peerzy · 10 Feb 2011 at 10:29

SiriusB said:
What's the difference between name and name1?

Not sure, 'name' looks like a billing address name as it's like this 'MR D A PARKER' where as 'name1' is more 'Mr Parker'.

Peerzy · 10 Feb 2011 at 15:14

Cheers really appreciate the help! They've got Office 2007 so should be fine.

The main merge way looks the best - am I able to attach something to these emails though? Also I take it I'll still need to buy that Send Personally or does this mail merge email them one at a time?

I'd never even heard of Powershell till yesterday but I'll do some reading up on it - batch files are just what I've used in the past.

Peerzy · 10 Feb 2011 at 15:40

SiriusB said:
Unfortunately it looks like you can't add an attachment. With the above you do not need to use the Send Personally plugin.

It may be better to send a link to the PDF online, rather than attaching it to the email, with perhaps some of your best deals in the email itself. I know personally I don't bother looking at catalogs [pdf or otherwise] unless something in an email catches my attention.

Yeah that's what I was thinking - don't think they have any webspace though so I'll have to find somewhere for them to host pdf files that is reliable and looks professional.

THIS looks interesting but has gone right over my head!

Reading about it HERE.