So I have a fairly monstropolous group of emails and associated addresses from my fanbase, and I downloaded MailChimp in order to organize them and create a big database for sending out email newsletters. The problem is that I can’t really figure out the most effective way to do this. The reasons for that are three:
1.) Each email is associated with about a zillion pieces of information (when was it sent? What was their stated reason for sending it-- associated with a specific fic, etc? Was it associated with a review? What were the specific interests that people talked about in their emails? Blah blah, bleh bleh, etc. )
2.) Now, Mailchimp CAN sort addresses according to these criteria, but when the lists are created in the first place, they obviously should be done in the most effective way. The emails I have now are not in Excel or delimited file format. They’re just… emails that were sent. So it’s going to be a lot of work to form this information into a list, and I really want to be sure that it’s being done right.
3.) The Mailchimp forums are closed, as we can see here, and that’s been the situation for months now. I can’t find a way to communicate with people who actually use Mailchimp regularly and try to get these questions answered in that way.
So… SMART, SMART people on Straightdope to the rescue! (Maybe. I know that there are people here who’ve used Mailchimp, but I don’t think that’s even necessary to possibly have information about what would be the most effective way to go here. If you’ve ever had to take a massive boatload of thousands of individual emails and separate them for a list, you probably know more than I do. All ideas and info welcome!
Well, I AM going to be doing it myself, because I really don’t trust anyone else to sort each piece of email according to 5-8 different categories. I don’t know… I guess I was hoping for someone who had actually tried doing this (not necessarily in Mailchimp.) It just seems like there are so many potential ways to not do/enter/think about/categorize all the information correctly in the first place and not realize it until much too late. That’s what I’m really trying to avoid. Thanks, though!
So you have an email address that you use for your fanbase to contact you, and you collect email sent to this address how? A mail client on your computer or does it stay online and you access it via the web?
You don’t have an address book, you just have this repository of emails from which you want to extract all of the sender’s email addresses and at the same time, categorize the email addresses based on the emails they sent.
Am I right so far?
If that’s the case then you are looking for a solution far, far from the scope of MailChimp. MailChimp is for sending email using lists you provide, not for extracting email addresses from mailboxes. I mean, how could they? There are hundreds of different mail clients and webmail systems…it’d be ambitious or near impossible for a company to formulate software to do what you want to do (if I am reading you right) let alone a company that is focused on creating and sending your emails.
I run a service identical to MailChimp and if one of our customers came to me with your (presumed) question I’d say “Hmm, that’s definitely something we can’t do. We’ll help you once you get everything in to Excel, tho!”
Anyway, if I’m reading you right, you need to step back a few paces from MailChimp and ask how you can automate your task based on the mail client (or webmail system) and your computer operating system.
I think that maybe I haven’t explained what I’m looking for very well. I plan to do the God-only-knows-how-many-zillions of hours work of extracting all the information from the original repository by hand, one at a time. I’m not expecting to find any shortcuts or automated processes, and I would not trust anything automated in this situation. All of this information will need to be extracted from the raw data I have before Mailchimp (or any similar program) could use it. I can’t even guess how long this will take, which is why it’s a good idea to start it now.
BUT, given how much work this 100% manual process really will be, I’m trying to figure out if there are obvious gotchas that are eventually going to make me say "Oh, God, why didn’t I think of this before I did the zillion hours of work?"When looking at this mass of information contained in emails, are there ways of organizing this information manually that are better than others-- not just using a specific program like Excel, but how do you organize the info in order to get it into that kind of file so that it’s most useful to you? What’s the most effective way to create categories? How could I minimize the chance of consistently not recording important pieces of information?
In other words, it’s not about trying to make it go faster, but rather how you’d conceptualize this huge task. I hope that clarified… something!
They were all sent through Yahoo mail… it was/is my regular address. What I’d like to pull out… addresses, names, subject lines would be good, date that email was originally sent, other possibilities include special interests, which fic they liked, rabid gushing/thoughtful critique/really didn’t like it/threat to track me down and make me rewrite the ending if they didn’t like it, if THEY wrote fics… that’s all I can think of.
Yahoo mail should be able to export an address book in a comma delimited format. Mailchimp can import that.
Personally I would try taking a comma delimited list from Yahoo. Import that in numbers as your personal database. Then copy it and make a stripped down version with only, name, email address. Thats all mail chimp cares about, it doesn’t understand all the other stuff.
You can have sublists in mailchimp if you need, for different types of person, I’d organize it myself in numbers into sublists, then import each one individually into Mailchimp.
For the standard stuff, such as address, subject lines, dates, etc., you might want to play with Yahoo Query Language. For the rest, that sounds too broad to do simple keyword searches, so it might have to be done manually.
The problem I see is that you have some very subjective criteria. “Rabid gushing” and “thoughtful critique” are not only beyond computers, but two humans might have different judgments about what fits in the category.
If I were you, I’d do this:
[ol]
[li]Extra the names and e-mail addresses only.[/li][li]Design a survey to collect all the other information you need/want. In the survey, ask questions about the categories of e-mails the people want to receive. Also ask questions about their opinions or any other kinds of feedback you want. Keep it short and narrowly targeted to what will be most helpful to you.[/li][li]Take the results of 1 and 2 - which will already be formatted as usable data - and combine them into a format that can import into Mail Chimp.[/li][/ol]
In other words… instead of doing a lot of work yourself or hiring someone to do it for you, let your audience do the work for free. Some will not respond to the survey and that’s useful information in and of itself. The current batch of e-mails that you have… I just don’t see them as a useful resource except in the most general and subjective sense. I think you’re wasting your time trying to scrape information out of them.
Okay, this is sounding close to what I’m looking for… here’s the thing, though. When I’m originally pulling out name and email addresses, the info is being organized once. But each piece of information in that delimited list would not be matched to a list of characteristics. So it would be organized in the sense of being able to send everybody email, but NOT in the sense of being able to sort out sublists based on characteristics. It sounds like I’d be doing the work email by email anyway. Which is fine! This is the culmination of a decade of fanbase building. I do not want to rush through it or try to automate things that can’t or shouldn’t be automated.
I like the survey idea, and I think it’s probably a good thing no matter what… but after I get replies back, wouldn’t each piece of information need to be entered response by individual response into Excel, matched to each email? So it wouldn’t be immediately usable data as sent back to me… I THINK… and again, that’s fine.
It gets better… oh, wait for this… I want to attach the fan email(s) that people originally sent me to the first email that I send to them.
If this all has to be done one email at a time and takes a thousand hours, then it takes a thousand hours. Although a hundred is closer to my guess.
And thanks to everyone for the helpful advice!! If Mailchimp actually had its forums open (or if it looked like they were ever going to start up again,) that’s where I’d be, but such is not the case. The people here are smarter anyway.
I am not familar with Mailchimp, but I’ve used Gammadyne Mailer for years. It has gotten easier to use (massive UI update a few revs ago helped tons) but if there is a mailing, mail list or email list management function it won’t do, I haven’t found it.
It will, among other things, extract email addresses from a raw dump of an email message folder.
As for managing the info with associated data, I’ve never found anything better than an Excel spreadsheet with a column added for each category of data you need. Sometimes you can extract sublists directly from it, sometimes you have to create a manually-edited sub-version of the sheet to associate the needed data and addresses.
But look into GDM if you aren’t completely committed to Mailchimp. It might be a better platform for your needs.
Excel is what I’d use, but there are ways to avoid manual re-entry of data. As long as you have a unique data field in both sets of data (e-mail, for example) you can have Excel use conditional statements to copy data from one worksheet to another.
Of course, my recommendation would be to add only the survey responders to the new newsletter. People can get very annoyed about being added to e-mail lists unless they specifically asked for it.
Great advice! Maybe I could copy the name and email addys, and then add further information for each… I really do want to attach people’s original email for exactly that reason; to remind them of the fact that they originally did send fanmail. What about just asking people to opt in to the list, though? I might not go through the work of answering a survey someone sent to me, even if I were interested in what they were offering-- but I wouldn’t choose to opt in unless I really wanted to be on that list.
I know that there are people here who’ve used Mailchimp, but I don’t think that’s even necessary to possibly have information about what would be the most effective way to go here. If you’ve ever had to take a massive boatload of thousands of individual emails and separate them for a list, you probably know more than I do. All ideas and info welcome! 
I don’t know… I guess I was hoping for someone who had actually tried doing this (not necessarily in Mailchimp.) It just seems like there are so many potential ways to not do/enter/think about/categorize all the information correctly in the first place and not realize it until much too late. That’s what I’m really trying to avoid. Thanks, though!
