Q: How can I convert a spreadsheet with subscribers into a LISTSERV Maestro subscriber list?

By Johannes Hubert
Senior Applications Programmer, L-Soft

If you have a spreadsheet containing a list of subscribers, instead of uploading it for each individual mail job and keeping the file up to date manually, it's better to let LISTSERV Maestro handle it all.

This tech tip shows how you can easily convert a spreadsheet (or text file) into a LISTSERV Maestro subscriber list, with automatically created profile fields based on your data.

From the main menu, select "New" and "Subscriber List".

Then follow the steps in the list creation wizard, as described below.

On the General page, enter the name of your subscriber list. You can also specify whether the list should have a special subscription consent field with associated subscription terms that subscribers must accept in order to subscribe to the list.

Then proceed to the Subscriber Data page and select the "I have existing subscriber data for this list" option. Then click on the "Upload a file with subscriber data" link and upload the spreadsheet file with your subscribers.

Once you have finished with the upload, proceed to the Summary page (the "Profile Field Details" page is not needed at the moment and remains disabled). On the Summary page, you can review the collected information so far and, when ready, click the "Create List, Import Subscribers Now" button to use this data for the list creation.

The subscriber list has now been created, but it still needs to be configured and filled with your uploaded data. For this, you are launched into a second wizard, to the Parse Details page, where you can review the uploaded data.

If necessary, you can adjust the settings used to parse the file, or you can use the "Back" button to go back to the Source page and upload a different file.

If the data has been uploaded and parsed correctly, proceed to the File Columns page, where you can define how the data from the uploaded file should be converted into the profile fields of the subscriber list. As you can see in the example below, for each column found in the file, a profile field is created by default. You can adjust these defaults, for example to give a profile field a different name or to make a profile field mandatory instead of optional. You can also change the profile field type (where applicable).

LISTSERV Maestro pre-fills the profile field settings with suggestions that are based on the uploaded data. In the example below, the "Size" field, which comes with three different values, is suggested as a "single select" field with these three values. And the "Premium" field, which only has the values "yes" and "no" is suggested as a "True/False" field. You can modify these suggestions as desired.

Additional configuration of the profile fields can be done on the following File Column Details page. In our example, where we added the special "Subscription Consent" field, we use this page to change the default for this content from "F" (=false) to "T" (=true) because we didn't have such a field in the uploaded spreadsheet, and we assume that consent has been given for all subscribers in the file.

After this, proceed to the Launch Import page, where you can trigger the import of the subscribers into the list by clicking the "Launch" button.

Once the import is complete, you are presented with an overview of the import results and can now start using your subscriber list.

And there you have it – a freshly created subscriber list with all of your subscriber data, neatly organized into profile fields that you can now use for target groups, filtering and as mail-merge fields.

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