How do I export and use e-mail addresses?

BizDiary has a built in mail-out feature, but sometimes you need to send an email to a distinct group of customers.  This article provides some tips on how to do this successfully.

Search for the Customers…

1. Select Customers > Search Customers from the menu.
2. Choose criteria that will give you the list of customers you need.
   Example: To find all customers who use the Customer Module…
   Select the Customer mod. tab and click on Active.
3. Click the [Search] button.

This will show you a list of all the customers who match the criteria you entered.

Export…

1. At the bottom of the customer table will be an Export link (only for Manager level and above).  Click this link.
2. A pop-up will show a list of available fields.  You can uncheck the ones you don’t need, and then click the [Export] button.
3. Either Save the download to your hard-disk, or Open it directly (in Excel or similar).

Create the email…

1. Create a new email in your email program.
2. Copy all the email addresses from Excel, and paste into a BCC field.
   For privacy reasons, you should always use BCC when sending a email to a group of people, because BCC makes sure that all the recipients don’t see each others email addresses.
3. In the To field type “Undisclosed Recipients <youremailaddress>”, replacing “youremailaddress” with your email address.
   Example: Undisclosed Recipients <johnsmith@example.com.au>
4. Add the subject and other text etc to your email and send.

Advanced topic #1: Display names in Email Addresses

When entering an email address you can also include the name that you want the email address to display as.  In the above example we use our regular email address, but make it appear as “Undisclosed Recipients”.  This is done because an email sometimes requires at least one visible recipient, and as a convention to let people receiving the email know that it has gone to other people but those people will not see each others email addresses.

This format...

Display Name <email address>

... can also be used in other ways.  It is commonly used to provide a person’s actual name as the display name, and for email addresses that are in your address book it is normally done for you without you having to think about it.

Advanced topic #2: Making “nice” Email Addresses with Excel

If you are sending an email from a list based in Excel, you might want to have peoples actual names show rather than just an email address.  Not only does this look more professional, but it also helps reduce the risk that your email will be incorrectly identified as Spam.

Let’s say we have an Excel spreadsheet with the following column...

• A = Last name
• B = First name
• C = Email

...and we want to create a column of “nice” email addresses that include the full name.

Assuming that the first row (1) contains our column headings, then we go to cell D2, and enter the following formula…

=B2&" "&A2&" <"&C2&">"

This tells Excel to join together the First Name, a space, the Last Name, a space and opening-angle-bracket, the email address, and finally a closing-angle-bracket.

So if our columns were "Smith" | "John" | "john-smith@example.com.au", we would get "John Smith <john-smith@example.com.au>".

Next we copy the formula down to the rest of the column.

Now we can copy the contents of the column to our BCC field of the email we are sending.

(The BCC field in an email stands for Blind Carbon Copy. By putting the email addresses in BCC you ensure that you are not sharing all these email addresses with every recipient, which is very important for privacy).