How to import contacts from a CSV without wrecking your data

An import takes two minutes and is hard to undo. Five minutes of preparation is the best trade in the product.

Importing is the fastest way to fill a CRM and the fastest way to ruin one. Every list you build afterwards inherits whatever came in, so a column mapped to the wrong field on Tuesday is still producing strange segments in March.

Prepare the file first

1. One header row, at the top No title row above it, no blank spacer, no merged cells. Exports from spreadsheets often carry a report title in row one, and that becomes your header.
2. Split names into first and last A single Full Name column means every greeting in every email says the whole name back at the person. That reads like a form letter because it is one.
3. One email per row A cell holding two addresses separated by a semicolon imports as one invalid address, and invalid addresses bounce.
4. Add a company column Without it every contact arrives unattached, and the company-level filters and pipeline views have nothing to group by.
5. Delete the columns you will not use It is easier to remove them now than to map twenty fields you do not want.

Map the columns

The mapping step is where the import is won or lost. LeadWise guesses from your headers, and the guesses are good, but two are worth checking every single time.

• Email. If this maps to anything else, nothing downstream works.
• Company. Frequently guessed as a job title when the header is something like Organisation or Account.

Anything you leave unmapped is simply not imported, which is a perfectly good way to skip a column you do not need.

After the import

Open Contacts and sort by newest. Two minutes here catches almost everything.

1. Do the names look like names, or does the first name column hold a full name?
2. Are contacts attached to companies, or is the company column blank?
3. Does the count roughly match the rows in your file? A large gap usually means duplicate emails, which are merged rather than duplicated.
4. Spot-check three records against the original file.

Once the data looks right, build the segment. Importing into a list you plan to email before you have looked at it is how a domain reputation gets damaged in one afternoon.

Do

• Test with fifty rows before importing fifty thousand.
• Split full names into first and last in the spreadsheet, before uploading.
• Verify the email and company mappings by eye, every time.
• Sort by newest and spot-check after every import.

Don't

• Do not import a purchased list. It will bounce, and bounces are charged to your sending domain, not to whoever sold it.
• Do not import the same file twice to "make sure it worked". Check instead.
• Do not map a column you are unsure about. Leave it out and add it later.
• Do not enroll a freshly imported list in a sequence the same minute. Look at it first.

What happens if an email already exists?

The existing contact is updated rather than duplicated, so re-importing an updated file is a safe way to fill in missing fields.

Can I undo an import?

There is no single undo button, which is exactly why the fifty-row test matters. Import small, check, then import the rest.

Which columns are actually required?

Email is the only one that must be present. First name, last name and company are what make the data usable afterwards.