Format data correctly for importing in to Sign-Up.to
If you’re importing your opt-in subscriber data in to your Sign-Up.to account it’s important to have it formatted correctly.
1. If you’re importing a large batch of data you’ll probably find it easiest to format your data using a spreadsheet program like Excel. To be recognised by Sign-Up.to, files must be saved in CSV (comma separated variable) format. Any spreadsheet program can create and save this type of file.
2. When viewing your data in a spreadsheet program it should be arranged so that each subscriber record is on a separate row of the spreadsheet and the data on each subscriber is arranged in columns.
In the very first row should be a heading for each column which tells Sign-Up.to what data type is in each column – for example if your file contained email addresses the first row should contain ‘email’ in the corresponding column. If you don’t included these headings in your file you’ll be prompted to tell Sign-Up.to what is in each column when you upload your data.
3. Sign-Up.to supports importing a wide range of data, including your own custom data fields. The standard data types you can import are:
| Data | Heading | Format |
|---|---|---|
| First Name | first_name | Text |
| Surname | surname | Text |
| Title | title | Text |
| E-mail Address | Text | |
| Mobile Number | mobile | International Number, e.g. 441234567890 |
| Landline | phone | Number, e.g. 08452990119 |
| E-mail Format | email_format | Either ‘text’ or ‘html’ (no quote marks) |
| Gender | gender | Either ‘male’ or ‘female’ (no quote marks) |
| Day of Birth | day_birth | Number (01-31) |
| Month of Birth | month_birth | Number (01-12) |
| Year of Birth | year_birth | Number (e.g. 1981) |
| Compound Date of Birth | dob_slash | Date in DD/MM/YYYY format (e.g. 11/06/1981) |
| House Number | house_number | Text |
| Street Name | street_name | Text |
| Town | town | Text |
| County | county | Text |
| Postcode | postcode | Valid Postcode (Text) |
| Country | country | 2 Letter ISO Country Code |
| Company | company_name | Text |
4. Once your data has been formatted correctly, save it as a CSV file and you’re then ready to import your data into your Sign-Up.to account.
Tip: If you are using Excel to format your file and are including mobile phone numbers be sure to select the column containing the numbers and change it’s data type to ‘Number’ with no decimal places before you save the file (right click to access the menu which contains the ‘format’ options). If you do not do this Excel may convert your mobile numbers into floating-point notation which will make them unusable.
