We were recently asked this question by a customer so I thought it would be nice to share the solution we worked out. This customer was using Zapier to automatically populate new subscribers from their CMS into their Google Sheet.
BoltMail can import new subscribers from a URL on a recurring basis, this feature can be found from Lists > Lists, click on your list name, then click on Tools, then click on Import, then click on URL.
However this URL must be a CSV file and must end with a ".csv" file extension. So how can we get Google Sheets to generate a CSV at a URL with a .csv extension?
When you are editing your Google Sheet, you will see that the URL in your browser location bar looks something like this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/XXXX/edit
(Where XXXX is a very long string of random letters and numbers that is unique to your Google Sheet)
To generate a URL that can be imported into BoltMail remove the /edit part from the end of your URL, and replace it with: "/export?format=csv&f=data.csv"
So your URL will now look something like:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/XXXX/export?format=csv&f=data.csv
To confirm that you have done this correctly test your modified URL in your web browser, it should trigger a CSV download.
If it works you can use the URL in BoltMail's URL import.
(If you are not using this URL in BoltMail then the "&f=data.csv" part doesn't actually do anything, so you can leave it off, we added this on the end because BoltMail requires the URL to end in ".csv")
For this to work your Google Sheet will need to have general access so that anyone with the link can view it. For security reasons be careful not to share the link URL on any public forum.
If you are using the URL import feature to import a CSV file from your own website then consider restricting access to just BoltMail's IP addresses so that it isn't publicly accessible. See Our IP addresses
