Switching from old email software to MailChimp

As director of the Penn State Entrepreneurship Network (PSEN), I have been entrusted with managing the 300-plus person email list. The list-serve software provided by Penn State is abysmal. Its user interface is unintuitive and doesn't provide any analytics. I decided to make the transition to MailChimp because of the powerful tools available "right out of the box": tracking who opened emails, and of those, who clicked on the link within the email. These basic analytics allow for powerful user-segmentation. Out of 300 people, it would be nice to know who is engaged with PSEN activity, and who isn't. MailChimp also offers dead-simple A/B testing. Essentially, MailChimp lets me know what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong in my campaigns. Fortunately, MailChimp has an easy-to-use address import feature. Just upload a file of comma-separated email addresses, and you're done. It's that easy. Unfortunately, L-Soft has no export feature. For the benefit of others (hopefully), I'm posting the steps I took to liberate more than 300 email addresses from the clutches of L-Soft and into the warm embrace of MailChimp.
  1. Log into L-Soft and get all email addresses displayed on a single page
  2. Save the HTML of the page
  3. Extract addresses from the HTML and dump into a CSV file
    4. I used a simple Ruby script:
  4. Upload to MailChimp
Alan 01 March 2011