Why should you upload subscriber lists to your platform?
Updated subscriber lists within your uConnect platform allow you to maximize on your office's reach. While subscribers can sign up for your platform independently, many could miss the signup option or forget to do so on their own. Because of this, we recommend that you upload an updated list of student users, or other subscriber types, at least every six months to ensure accuracy.
Within your Admin dashboard, you are able to add new subscribers and assign them any email / Community preferences, update existing subscribers so that they have different subscriber preferences, and remove subscribers altogether. You can add any subscriber type, as well, whether that be students, alumni, employers, faculty - anyone who you would like to communicate with proactively.
Once subscribers are in your platform, you are then able to take full advantage of your automated alert functionality, as well as to send custom emails to curated segments of your user population (psst, learn more about custom email use cases and subscriber lists here!).
Read on, or watch the video at the bottom of this article, to learn how you can upload your own subscriber list today!
Uploading Subscribers: Step by Step
1) Generate your subscriber file. Within our subscriber upload tool, you can upload as many subscriber types at one time as you like. For each subscriber that you are adding, you will need to have their first name, last name, email address, and, if they are student and your platform uses SSO, their SSO ID. Each of these needs to be in a unique column in your Excel or .csv file.
You are also able to add any additional, unique columns in your file that correspond to your Community Groups found under Manage > Communities. This is optional. If you would like, for example to pre-subscribe users to your Career Communities, you can add a Career Community column, and then for each subscriber list the relevant Career Community or Communities that you would like them subscribed to. If subscribing a user to multiple Communities from one Community Group, use the same column, but separate the Communities with a semicolon.
Reminder: If you are adding student subscribers, and SSO is active on your platform, you will need to include a column for SSO ID, that contains an SSO ID for each student subscriber. This is to ensure that no users encounter login errors if signing into your platform.
2) Download your file. Your file should be in .xlsx, .xls, or .csv format.
3) Navigate to the subscriber upload area. From the Admin dashboard, expand the 'Engage' area of the dashboard. From there, hover over 'Subscribers' and select 'Upload Subscribers.'
4) Select your subscriber upload action. From the subscriber upload area, select the file that you have generated. Then, select whether you would like to add these as:
New subscribers
Existing subscribers who you would like to update to have different preferences
Existing subscribers who you would like to remove tags from (note: you must include in your file the tag that you would like to remove from the subscriber)
Existing subscribers who you would like to to unsubscribe from your emails
Existing subscribers whose emails were previously unable to receive emails, but now can
Existing subscribers who you would like to delete from your platform
5) Select 'Update and Map Fields.' Selecting this button will take you to the mapping area. Here, you will see each of the columns that were included in your uploaded file, and the option to map them to corresponding fields.
If you are adding new subscribers, it is required that you map First Name, Last Name, Email Address and User Login/ID (if a student, and if SSO is enabled) from the dropdowns to a corresponding column in your file. Otherwise, Email Address will be the only required field to map.
This area is where you can select a corresponding Community Group if you would like to pre-subscriber your users to specific Communities.
Note: If you are updating subscribers, you may also see the option to maintain any subscriber's preferences that they have customized themselves, or to instead replace their preferences with those in your file. Typically, it is recommended that you maintain a subscriber's preferences, unless you are adding an additional preference to their preferences, for the purpose of email communications.
6) Confirm your mappings. If you opted to pre-subscribe users to a specific Community, you may see this screen if one or more of your mappings did not have a 1:1 match. For example, if one subscriber in your file listed 'Finance & Accounting' but your platform only has a 'Finance' Community, the subscriber upload area will give you the chance to confirm where you would like the 'Finance & Accounting' subscriber to be pre-subscribed. It is optional to confirm these non-matching data points.
7) Import subscribers. After importing, you will see how many subscribers have been added, updated or removed from your platform. To see more of your subscribers who are in your platform, you can navigate to Engage > Subscribers, in your dashboard.
You are also able to navigate to the Engage > Subscribers > Subscriber Upload Log to see a historical record of your subscriber loads.