Emailing via a CSV file

Peerzy

Peerzy

Peerzy

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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.
 
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What email client does he use, if any?

Outlook, for example, will let you send an email to everyone in a distribution list and you can use Send Personally to make sure that only the recipients name appears in the To field. You can also use the plugin to add the user's name and other details to the email.

As for getting the details into Outlook, I am not certain. I am sure someone may have an idea about that!

EDIT: If I know what format your CSV files are in [i.e column names] I might be able to write a script to convert it to a .CSV Outlook can import into Contacts. Possibly a tool exists already for this, too lazy to look, though! :p
 
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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.
 
Outlook is fantastic. Well worth having, especially if he uses other Office software. Alternatively he could try Thunderbird or some other client. You would have to look into whether it supports what you need to do, though!

All Outlook needs is First Name, Surname and email address. I can easily write a script that spits out a new CSV to import into Outlook or any other client.

As for Send Personally, £16 is not a lot of money. It is the only one I know of, off hand, so there could be a free tool.
 
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.
 
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 said:
He's also worried spam filters might start to filter him out as he will be sending about 250 emails a month.
Click to expand...

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)
 
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)
Click to expand...

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.
 
OK, change of plan!

In Word 2010 I have discovered a way of doing what you need. I will assume the same will work in Word 2007 too. 2003 and earlier will likely be similar, assuming the support mail-merge for email!

Open Word.
Click Mailings in the toolbar
Click Select Recipients in the Ribbon
Click Use existing list...
Browse to the CSV file* and click Open
Click Edit Recipient List and check everything looks OK.
Click OK

Click Start Mail Merge and choose Email messages.
Click on Greeting Line to insert the "Dear Mr A" bit [it will show up as <<GreetingLine>> in the document].
Click on Insert Merge Field if there are other fields you wish to personalise.
Type/paste the email.
Click Preview Results to see how your email looks with the personal info [you can scroll through each one using the Prev/Next buttons.
When happy, click Finish & Merger and choose Send E-mails...
Fill out the options then click OK.
Job done! :D

I suggest using mock addresses or testing it internally before spamming your customers - in case you need to tweak the email!

*The CSV file with the headings you supplied will work as-is for the mail-merge process. However, Word 2010 matches name to the Last Name field. This will cause the greeting line not to work. You need to click Match Fields under Mailings and set Last Name to (not matched) and set First Name to name.

Alternatively, and if you have Powershell installed, you could use this one-liner to convert the CSV from your database to a format Office can read without any changes:

Code: 
import-csv "C:\path to\file.csv" | Select @{Label="First Name"; Expression={$_.name}}, @{Label="E-mail Address"; Express
ion={$_.email}} | Export-Csv "C:\path to\outlook.csv" -NoTypeInformation
This is all one line, but can be wrapped up into a script!

I could work out how to do the same using a batch file if you wish, but the above is likely much nicer! :p If you need any help with PS email me via my Trust. :)
 
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.
 
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.
 
I wonder what program OcUK use to mass mail image flyers? Works pretty well across the board on my email address'
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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In the second link, scroll down to a post by apadadop. He has written a simple step-by-step which is much easier to follow than your first link.

Personally I still think you are better off having all the information in the email, with an option to check out the PDF hosted online. Hosting is dirt cheap and you don't need to have a website set up to link to a file.

As an alternative to the VBA method you found, you could again look to mapiLab and use their Mail Merge Toolkit. Again it is £16, but looks to me like a much cleaner way of doing it. I am in no way affiliated with mapiLabs, I just think they make good tools! :D
 
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