Explosive Email to SMS: Outlook & Excel Part 1

Sending thousands of email to SMS messages to a distribution list in Outlook might seem impossible. Here’s how you can do it, using your Microsoft Outlook contacts and Microsoft Excel.

To start off, I’d like us to assume that all contacts we’re about to message have opted in to receive SMS messages from us. Sending unsolicited SMS messages could not only give your business a bad name, but also land you in a bit of trouble. But, assuming all your contacts have opted in, let’s have a look at how you can send many email to SMS messages in no time at all using Excel and Microsoft Outlook.

Step 1 – Export from Outlook

For the purpose of this blog, we’ll assume that you have all the contacts you want to send an SMS message to in a distribution list in Microsoft Outlook, with all their mobile numbers stored in their individual contact profiles.

Problem: When exporting from Excel, mobile numbers stored in customer profiles can only be exported when the entire ‘Contacts’ is exported. How do you only export your distribution list?

1. To solve the above problem, we do a normal export of the ‘Contacts’ folder in Microsoft Outlook to a .xls (or .xlsx) file.
2. Next up, go to your Outlook ‘Contacts’ folder and double-click your distribution list. Save it as a text file, perhaps in the same folder where the exported contacts file has been saved.
3. When you open the distribution list text file (the people you want to send to), press select all (CTRL+A) and copy (CTRL+C).
4. Open the exported contacts Excel file and delete all the columns you don’t want to use, so that you’re left with those you do want to use (e.g. Name, number). Paste the copied content into the open Excel file, a few columns removed from the data that is there.
5. The rows pasted from your distribution list text file might occupy two columns. Delete the column with the email addresses – they won’t be necessary (select the entire column with one click to avoid wasting time).
6. Now, you’ll note that the cells containing the distribution list contacts are formatted like this: Name Surname (email address). We need to remove the email address as well as the brackets. This can be done by doing a ‘Find & Replace All’ in Excel .

Tip: To find and delete only email addresses contained in brackets, use the following wildcard to match to: (*)

7. Next up, we want to merge the first name and last name columns in the original contacts file to match the same format of the pasted distribution list names and surnames. Here’s how to do it:
   1. If your original contact columns are in the <name><surname><mobile phone> format, insert a blank column after the surname column.
   2. In the first cell of the inserted column (the cell right next to the first surname in your list), enter the following formula:

   =B2&” “&C2

   3. If the column you inserted is ‘D’, then you’d probably want to merge the contents of columns B and C. The above merges the contents of cells B2 and C2 into D2 (if D2 is where you pasted the above formula) with a space separating the values.

Think you’ve got it? Try it for your whole list by copying & pasting the formula into all applicable cells in column ‘D’ in one go.If you’re having problems, keep practising a bit or let us know if you have any questions. In next week we’ll see how you can compare your main contact list with the entries from the distribution list and send messages to your contacts using email to SMS.

Alternatively, read more about this handly method of SMS messaging on our email to SMS page.

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Tags: email to SMS, excel SMS, outlook SMS, SMTP