Connecting Contactually to your email, phone, and calendar is the best way to keep your Contactually contacts up-to-date, but sometimes you find yourself with contacts from other sources. When dealing with contacts from LinkedIn, CRMs, business cards, registration/open house lists, and other non-synced sources, use a spreadsheet to import your contacts into Contactually and start building these relationships.
In this article:
Need help by step?
Acceptable formats
Contactually requires a csv-formatted list of contacts with a column name in the first-row. The column names should be unique within the file. Standard spreadsheet programs like Excel and Google Sheets make it easy to save your file in this format.
- If your file is in Excel, go to File > Save As > Comma Separated Values (.csv). Note that Excel will only save your first tab—this format does not support multiple tabs. If you have multiple tabs of contacts, either combine them or save them separately.
- If your file is in Google Sheets, go to File > Download As > Comma-separated Values (.csv, current sheet). This will save your current sheet only—if you have multiple tabs of contacts, either combine them or save them separately.
Each contact that you are importing needs to have one of: First Name, Last Name, or Email Address.
Importing your CSV file
Start by clicking on Import, on the Contacts page.
You are now ready to configure your import.
Upload
In the Upload step, you will set some basic parameters for the import.
- Choose your file.
- Select what should happen to existing Contactually contacts if they are also in this file. If you choose to import existing contacts, any new information will be added to your contacts, so you may end up with multiple addresses, emails, or phone numbers. In the case where the type of information can only have one entry (like Job Title or Last Name), your import will overwrite the existing information. Existing contacts are matched on email address.
- Optionally, choose one or more Buckets (or add a new one) to which you want to add ALL imported contacts. If you want to put contacts into different Buckets by contact, you can add a column in your import file with this information.
- Optionally, choose one or more Tags (or add a new one) with which to label ALL imported contacts. If you want to label contacts with different Tags by contact, you can add a column in your import file with this information.
Quick Tip: Consider creating a new Tag for this import (e.g. Dec 12 Open House). If you need to quickly find all of the users who were affected by the import, the Tag can help you filter.
- Click “Next”.
Match
In the Match step, you will map the columns in your file to Contactually contact fields. For each column, you have a few options:
- Use the Contactually Field recommendation, based on the column header name. Review all recommendations and change the matched Field, if desired.
- Complete the Field matching where Contactually cannot make a recommendation. In this case, you will see a red dropdown box alerting you to select a Field
- Configure or match to your Custom Fields. If you choose “Custom Field” from the dropdown, you can select an existing Custom Field or type in a new Custom Field name. You can map to any existing custom field, but, if you create a new one, it will be created as a single-line text field. Learn more about custom fields and which type to use. More information about fixing custom field errors.
- Add or change the Label (Personal, Work, Other, etc) for addresses, emails, or phone number. You can also type in the box to create a custom Label. Complete your matching before adding Labels, as changing the Field will reset the Label. The Label only is required for addresses, but you must set it for all address components that belong together (street address, city, state, etc). Do not use the same Label more than once for the same field in the same upload - you cannot match two Home addresses at once, for example.
Quick Tip: Are your address labels in the file as their own column? Learn how to map those.
- Choose the correct date format. When mapping to the date field, you'll be presented with a choice of MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY. Choose the one that matches your file format. You cannot specify a custom date format. Learn more about formats.
- Choose to skip some of your data columns, rather than import them. Click on the checkbox to the left of the field name to uncheck it, and the field will be skipped. If there is no data in the column, the field is automatically excluded.
Any issues in red must be resolved clicking “Next”.
Fix
In the Fix step, Contactually validates your file and surfaces any records with unexpected data. You can correct these records directly on the screen by typing in the information and then clicking “Update”. Any records that do not have one of First Name, Last Name, or Email are also identified during this step.
If you cannot correct the information, use the “X” on the left to mark this record to be skipped during the import and remove it from the page. Any records that you don’t update will be marked as skipped by default.
Preview
In the Preview step, you’ll see how your data set will look in Contactually, including the labels applied to address groups. If you are happy with the preview, clicking the import button starts the import process.
After the import
If you remain on the page, you will see a summary of your import once it completes—usually in a matter of minutes, depending on the size of import and system traffic. You will also receive that summary via email and a brief note in your Contactually notification panel:
Tips and tricks for imports
Maximum file size
The maximum supported file size is 2,000 contacts.
Applying Tags and Buckets
Your spreadsheet can have a comma-separated list of Tags or Buckets to add contacts to more than one Tag or Bucket. The list does not have to be the same for each contact, but Tags should be in a separate column than Buckets. To match to existing Tags or Buckets, you must match exactly, including punctuation, spaces, and upper/lower-case letters.
You can also add multiple Tags and Buckets in separate columns, as long as they have different column/field names, such as "Bucket 1" and "Bucket 2". To apply the same set of Tags or Buckets to the entire file, you can use the configuration on the Upload step.
Updating Archived contacts
You can update an existing Archived contact through an import; it will remain in an Archived state. If your import is configured to add the contact to a Bucket, this action will not apply to Archived contacts, although they can still have a Tag added.
The following date formats are acceptable for birthdays or anniversaries, and you will choose whether the day comes before the month, or the month before the day, in your file.
Example values for October 29, 2012:
- 10/29/2012
- 10-29-2012
For these values, choose MM/DD/YYYY.
- 29/10/2012
- 29-10-2012
For these values, choose DD/MM/YYYY.
A recurring event is created for October 29 each year. A four-digit year is recommended for precision.
If you do not have the year of the event in your file, you can also use a MM/DD or DD/MM format, without the year. In this case, Contactually will append the current year to your event.
If you map to a custom field with a finite set of values, such as a list or a Boolean (true/false) field, the values in your file with be validated during the Fix step. If you have values that don't match how your custom fields are set up, you can open a new tab and update your custom field settings (e.g. add another option to your list-type field). Then, refresh the Fix page to re-validate those fields. Alternately, you can edit the records that don't match inline during the Fix step (e.g. to correct a misspelling in the entry).
List values are case-sensitive for matching purposes. Boolean values can take on any of the following:
- False: false, no, nope, n, 0
- True: true, yes, yep, y, 1
Tips for multiple emails, addresses, or phones
The import process can support multiple email addresses, physical addresses, and/or phone numbers. Because addresses have multiple fields (street, city, state, etc), if you are importing multiple addresses, it is recommended that you:
- Keep fields together that belong together—group the street, city, state, and zip for the one address together in adjacent columns
- Label the addresses distinctly in your file – Home Address, Home City, Home State, and Home ZIP
Both of these steps will help ensure that you can label the address properly for your contact during the Match step
Address labels in the file
In some cases, your file may contain a column with a label for the address type, which may be different per contact:
In this case, you can map the label column name (First Address Label) to the Address Label field. Now you can select (First Address Label) in the Label dropdown to dynamically label your address components:
