Newsletter offers many tools to manage your subscribers: from search and edit, to import and export, to massive maintenance actions like deletion, list moving, and so on.
Here you find a overview of the main tools and some tips to use them.
- Setting one or more subscriber as “test subscriber”
- Resend the activation email
- Import and export and bounced
- Deal with inactive subscribers
Test subscribers
The best way to make a reliable test is to send a newsletter to real subscribers. This way the email is composed using real user’s data, like the name, email, identification code, sex, preferences, and so on.
Newsletter provides a setting that enables a regular subscriber to become a “test subscriber”. Opening a subscriber editing panel, there is a selection to set him as “test”.
A test subscriber remains a regular subscriber, so when you send a real newsletter he’ll receive it. But when you send a test only subscribers with test settings to “yes” are used.
A note: sometimes the extraction of test subscribers ignores preferences or other targeting settings, it depends on the context. So if you set a newsletter to be addressed only to women, probably even if a test subscriber is a man he will be used as a recipient.
How to resend an activation email
If you are in a particular situation with an important number of subscribers not confirmed (for any reason), you may want to send to all a (new) confirmation message.
To complete this task, you should create a regular newsletter set to be addressed to the not confirmed subscribers. In this email, it’s important to add the {subscription_confirm_url} tag as it is used in the normal confirmation message (configurable on Subscription panel).
This method grants a secure delivery of this confirmation email even to a big number of subscribers.
Import and export
Import subscribers from external sources
To import subscribers it is recommended to install the free Advanced Import add-on which provides ways to import from CSV files, copy-and-paste data, massive bounced addresses import.
The import can be conducted in different modes: data merge, data replace, and so on.
Export subscribers
The export produces a CSV (UTF-8 encoded) file containing all the subscribers’ data. Usually, that file can be opened with Excel, Calc, Google Sheets.
The status columns may show different values:
- C – Confirmed: the subscriber has confirmed the subscription (with single opt-in the subscription is confirmed without any other subscriber action than submitting its email)
- S – To be confirmed: the subscriber has been requested to activate the subscription via an activation email
- B – Bounced: the email address has been reported to be unreachable
- U – Unsubscribed: the subscriber has opted-out
Importing bounced email addresses and mark the subscribers as “bounced”
Bounced addresses, for example, collected via delivery error emails returned to your mailbox, can be processed with the Advanced Import add-on.
Inactive subscribers
Newsletter keeps track of subscriber interaction storing a timestamp of the last subscriber’s action. This date and time are then used to compute the inactive subscribers when no actions are seen for a period of time (3 months, 6 months, and so on).
On the subscriber maintenance panel, you can select to add all inactive subscribers, selecting the time window, on a list you created and then take some actions:
- try to rech them out with a special newsletter to get them back
- completely delete those subscribers from your database
There is not a uniform approach to “inactive” subscribers, it mostly depends on your kind of business. Sometimes contacting subscribers once a year is ok, sometimes newsletter are sent daily based.