The Scenario
You are a course creator. You just closed enrollment and 900 new students are sitting in an Excel workbook — email in column A, first name in column B, last name in column C, course name in column D.
The welcome email sequence in MailerLite is set to fire tomorrow. Every student needs to be in the 'New Students' group before that happens, with the COURSE_NAME custom field populated so the emails reference the right course.
The bad version of this morning:
- You export the workbook as a CSV
- You log into MailerLite, go to Subscribers, click Import
- You map the columns — email, first name, last name
- You realize the COURSE_NAME custom field is not in the standard mapping UI
- You spend twenty minutes figuring out how to include it
- MailerLite finishes and shows you an import summary — but not which individual rows failed
- You head into tomorrow not knowing if 40 students are going to get a welcome email about the wrong course.
The fast version writes the outcome per row, inside the workbook, so you know exactly what happened.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that calls the MailerLite API row by row and writes the result back — no CSV upload, no import results page.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Import all rows in this workbook as MailerLite subscribers into the group named 'New Students' using email in column A, first name in column B, last name in column C — set the custom field COURSE_NAME to the value in column D for each. Write IMPORTED or ERROR into column E.
SheetXAI reads every row, calls the MailerLite subscriber API for each one, sets the custom field, adds the subscriber to the group, and writes the result into column E. If a row fails, the ERROR status lands right next to it.
What You Get
A complete MailerLite import with per-row outcomes written back to the workbook:
- 900 subscribers added to the 'New Students' group
- COURSE_NAME custom field set per subscriber from column D
- IMPORTED or ERROR written into column E for every row
- No results page to click through — everything is in the workbook
The per-row outcome is what makes this different from a CSV upload. If 12 rows failed, you know which 12. You fix them and rerun just those rows.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real enrollment exports are never clean. SheetXAI handles cleanup and the import in the same prompt.
When email addresses have extra spaces or mixed case
The export came from a form tool that did not normalize inputs.
Before importing, trim whitespace from column A and convert all emails to lowercase. Then import each row into the 'New Students' MailerLite group using columns A–D, setting COURSE_NAME from column D. Write IMPORTED or ERROR into column E.
When some rows are missing a course name
A handful of students signed up through a promo link that did not capture the course field.
For rows where column D is blank, set COURSE_NAME to 'General Enrollment' before importing. Then import all rows into the 'New Students' MailerLite group. Write IMPORTED or ERROR into column E.
When duplicates snuck in from the form tool
The enrollment form had a bug and some students submitted twice.
Deduplicate column A, keeping the first occurrence of each email. Then import the deduplicated list into the 'New Students' MailerLite group with custom field COURSE_NAME from column D. Write IMPORTED or ERROR into column E.
When you also need to tag by subscription tier
Some students paid full price, some used a discount code stored in column E.
Import all rows into the 'New Students' MailerLite group. Set COURSE_NAME from column D. If column E contains a discount code, set the custom field ENROLLMENT_TYPE to 'Discounted'; otherwise set it to 'Full Price'. Write IMPORTED or ERROR into column F.
The pattern: describe the cleanup and the import in one prompt. The outcome lands in the workbook.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a subscriber list, then ask it to import the rows into MailerLite with the group and custom fields you need. The MailerLite integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to sync group membership from an Excel workbook or the MailerLite in Excel overview.