Import contacts

Importing is how most lists get filled. You upload a CSV, tell IGSendMail which column is which, and the file becomes contacts on a list. When you finish this page you will have your contacts on a list and you will know how to read the import result.

Prepare the file#

The import expects a CSV: one header row, one contact per row after it.

• Save as CSV, not XLSX. Export from your spreadsheet with Save as or Export, and choose comma separated values. Renaming an .xlsx file to .csv does not convert it and the import will fail.
• Use UTF-8 encoding. This matters if your data has accented characters, non-Latin scripts, or currency symbols. Without it, names arrive mangled.
• Give every column a header. Headers are what you map against. A blank header is hard to identify in the mapping step.
• One email address per row. A cell holding two addresses separated by a semicolon imports as one invalid address, not two contacts.
• Strip the noise. Remove merged cells, subtotal rows, blank rows, and any explanatory text above the header row. The header must be the first line of the file.
• Split names if you want to personalize. A single "Sarah Chen" column can only ever produce "Hi Sarah Chen". Separate first and last name columns give you "Hi Sarah".

Run the import#

What happens to duplicates#

If an address in your file already exists on that list, the import does not create a second contact. The existing record is updated with the values from your file.

That is useful and occasionally surprising. If your CSV has an empty cell where the contact already has a value, check the result before assuming it was preserved. The safe habit is to only include columns you actually intend to write.

Duplicates within the file itself resolve the same way: the last row for a given address wins.

Unsubscribed and blacklisted addresses#

Suppression survives an import. This is deliberate and you should not try to work around it.

• An address that unsubscribed from this list stays unsubscribed. Re-importing it does not resubscribe it.
• An address on the account Blacklist is not mailable, whatever the import does with the row.
• A previously hard-bounced address stays suppressed.

Importing a file to "reset" a suppressed contact is the single most damaging thing you can do to your sending reputation. See Blacklist and suppression for what lands there and why.

Add a single contact by hand#

For one address, an import is overkill. Open the list, choose the option to add a contact, enter the email address, fill in whatever field values you have, and save. The contact is created subscribed to that list.

Use this for a colleague who needs to see the campaign, or for a signup someone passed you by phone.

Troubleshooting#

Everything landed in one column. The delimiter is wrong. Your file is semicolon or tab separated and the import read it as comma separated. Re-export with commas, or set the delimiter to match the file.

Some columns are empty on every contact. Those columns were not mapped, or were mapped to a field that does not exist. Create the field on the list, then re-import the file. Because duplicates update in place, re-importing the same file is safe and fills in the missing values.

Rows rejected as invalid email addresses. Usually a stray space, a missing @, a typo in the domain such as gmial.com, or two addresses jammed into one cell. Open the rejected rows in your spreadsheet, fix them, and import that corrected subset as a second smaller file.

The count went up by less than the file had rows. Duplicates updated instead of creating, suppressed addresses were skipped, or invalid rows were rejected. The import summary breaks this down. It is normal for a file you have imported before to add almost nobody.

Names arrived with question marks or odd symbols. The file was not saved as UTF-8. Re-export with UTF-8 encoding and import again to overwrite the bad values.

Nothing imported at all. Check that the first line of the file is the header row.