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Transcript of How to Import a List into MailChimp

Hey guys. So we’re in the second step of setting up the MailChimp account for our sweet little Start A Bakery site. And what we’re going to do now is import our list.

I went into Aweber and I downloaded all my subscribers – exported them is actually specifically what I did. I exported them to a CSV file and so I now have that on my desktop. And what we’re going to do now is go Import Your List.

Some of you will be just starting out and you won’t have a list to import and that’s totally cool, that means you get to skip this step.

But what we’re going to call this list name is “Start A Bakery”. Always be careful with these because, just like it says right here, your subscribers will see that so you want to be real careful. Contact email – “from” email is contact@startabakery. “From” name – Start A Bakery. “Remind people how they got on your list”. “You signed up for these emails on our website, Facebook page or other social media account”. That’s not ideal but we can change that. That will appear in all your emails, like it says here.

So contact information, this is all good, I’m happy with this. If you want to edit, this is where you control how often you hear from people.

And so, I guess, if you’re really excited and you don’t get a lot of subscribers, you could do one-by-one subscribe notifications as they happen. That would be unsubscribes – that would be depressing, I wouldn’t want to get interrupted by an unsubscribe. I think a daily summary of subscribe/unsubscribe activity is a good way to go. And so we do “Create List and Go To Import”.

“Is your list allowed?” Yes, we will go into that later. But, basically, again, you never, ever buy a list, you never scrape a list, you never steal anyone else’s list. I won’t even talk about knowing when people steal other peoples list. What I’m going to do here is “Import from a CSV or TXT File”. Keep in mind that MailChimp actually does recommend, if you’ve got a really tiny list, to “Copy/Paste from Excel”. I don’t know what their definition of “tiny” would be. It would probably be, I would imagine, like less than a hundred, two hundred subscribers. But for right now I’m going to do my CSV because that’s what I’ve got.

And so here we just click Browse and I’m going to go up to my desktop and, again, you guys can always see my files. I’ve got to clean up my files. “Bakery Export”, there we go. And so that’s pretty good.

We’re going to go into “Upload List”. And so here you’re going to see a lot of stuff. First thing you want to do is not “Show skipped columns”. And this is going to give you, as you can see, yes, this is clearly the most important thing. I definitely want “Name”. So I’m going to click Save for that and click Save for that. It wants me to make a selection, even though it’s usually “First Name”. Hmm. It does not give me a choice of when I merged them. So I’m going to go with “First Name”. And then from here, we want to skip “Date Added”, we can skip that. I guess it does give me opt-in time, so I’ll keep that. “Column name”. Last follow-up date, do they offer me that? No, they do not. So I’m going to skip that. “Stop Time”, skip. All this.

Part of me wants to preserve all this information but I’m not going to get that grand earlier with this list. So let’s leave all that alone. And, great. So we’ve only got three here, which is excellent. This will tell me how long people have been on the list, which may become helpful later if I wanted to send a special email to people.

And so I’m going to click “Complete Import”. And we are going to help for the best. This almost always works out, too. And then they give you a chance to review if, you know, like some of the addresses are a little bit buggy. Say, they’re missing an @ sign or someone has spelled “Gmail” without an “A” or something like that. It’s fairly, really easy. And we don’t need to know about that. And I’m going to pause this so you just don’t have to wait through the whole thing.

I just wanted to show you that the list – they’re still giving me these helpful little messages, which is cool. They have accepted all my subscribers, which is awesome. That’s a nice start. And so my list is good and I will see you in the next video. Bye.