What should I consider when I import subscribers?

Looking to import a current list of subscribers into AWeber? Great! This is something we love to see.

The steps of actually moving those files over can be seen in our import guide but there are some other things to keep in mind when importing to make sure that the process goes smoothly.

Carefully Importing Subscribers Is A Smoother Experience

Please make sure that only current subscribers are being imported. Make sure that if you are importing subscribers from another service or another list in your AWeber account, that you filter out any unsubscribed addresses to prevent them from being moved over.

Similarly, if there are subscribers in your list that have a history of bounces and delivery failures, they should also be omitted from your import.

We ask that you bring in active subscribers that have either been collected or contacted within the last six months. The usual lifespan of an email address is six months and after that time you start to run into more dead addresses, domains that no longer exist, or people who no longer remember signing up for your content. These lead to a higher bounce rate and complaints that can endanger your deliverability and the success of future imports.

If you are bringing in a file of subscribers, make sure that it is in a format that our importing tool can use. Those formats are:

  • XLS
  • XLSX
  • TSV
  • CSV
  • TXT

Open your file before importing and make sure that the data is formatted properly. It should be displayed in corresponding columns and rows to ensure we can read everything properly on our end. Blank rows, missing emails or broken formatting can cause the import tool to cut off prematurely. If there are characters other than numbers, letters, hyphens, @'s, or underscores, it may not count that row of data.

You must have one column for emails. Removing any columns of information that you would not need along with blank ones will help the process along. This is especially true during the mapping process, where you are asked to match columns up to related fields.

For example, this file contains only Name, Email, and a custom field for 'Pet':

Spreadsheet columns

You can specify if you'd like existing subscribers in your list to be updated with the information in the file you are importing, or if you would only like to add new subscribers into your list.

Import new or update existing subscribers

Then, specify the information pulled from the first row in your import with the combo boxes on the right:

Map your fields

Note: You can discard any unneeded columns in the import tool as well.

You will be asked during the import process where these subscribers were collected. If there are multiple websites, locations, or sources for your import, please cover those in as much detail as you can. Selecting the 'Other' option during this step of the import process will give you a text box to add that information. The more details that our import team has to review the better determination they can make.

Provide details about their sign up

Additionally, if you are planning to have these subscribers go into a campaign, make sure it is active or that you apply the related tag to these subscribers when completing the import process.

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