How To Import And Export Your Contacts With With Web Geeks Marketing Platform
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Hi, I’m Allie, our AI-powered, training personality.
It is always good practice in business to keep back-ups of information, things such as contacts are one of the important things you should think of when it comes to this process. Well, Web Geeks marketing platform allows you to both import and export your contacts at any given time. And the process is incredibly simple! Today we are going to look into, exactly how this feature works.
Let’s get started!
First, we need to navigate on over to contacts in the left-hand sidebar. For this example, I am just going to export a few of my contacts, let’s use a few of the Ayeye family for now. So I’ll just select them from the list, and click on export. This will bring up a confirmation window, where I just hit, “export contacts”. This will download the contacts to my computer in CSV format, which you will be able to open, and view in Excel. All I have to do now, is move it to a backup drive, and rest assured, knowing my contacts are safe for the future. Doing this, can also help, if you need to send them to someone else, or import them into another program.
But, what about importing contacts? You probably want to import your contacts from other programs so they are all here in one place, so let’s show you how to do that too. I have a contacts file I made earlier ready to import. It is important to note, that when you import contacts, you need to use an admin account. And that the file you are trying to import is no more than 50>mb.
You will also need to make sure that the first row of your document is not blank. Include a header row, in which at least one field corresponds to a field in the system. If you have additional columns not currently present in the system, you will need to create these using “custom fields” before you do the import. To do this, just click on the settings cog then “add field”, and choose the input type you need. So, for example, for “type of house” you would need a single line. Then click on next. Then name your field, I’ll just enter “type of house” Make sure that the object drop-down is set to contacts, and select the type of group that the information comes under. I am going to choose additional information for now, and click save.
For automated matching, make sure that these follow the same format, as the format in your document, for example, the same capitalisation and spelling, as the fields you have created. However, you will get the opportunity to match fields in the document, to fields in the system later. Lastly, make sure that the document contains no more than one sheet/tab.
Now, all we have to do is click on import, up in the toolbar above our contacts. Then, i will click on, “upload file” which will prompt me to upload a file from my computer. Now, I’ll just click on the file i made earlier, and hit open. And click next. As you can see, all of our information has been mapped to fields in the system, apart from one, here at the bottom. You can either choose to ignore this by ticking the box at the bottom here, and not import that particular data, or you can match this manually as I mentioned before.
For this example, I have made a column that may vary from program to program. Currently, in the system, we have the field “city”. However, in my document, the city is listed under the header, “town”. So to match this up correctly, all we have to do is select “city” from the drop-down menu. Now, all of our fields are matched, and we can continue with the process by clicking “next”.
At this point, you will be asked if you would like to create a smart list from the contacts you are importing. This can be very handy if you are importing a specific set of contacts into the system. Perhaps you have customers who are only working with one of your sites, you can just name this list, “Site 2 Customers” and then tick the box below which will create the list, as well as adding them to the general contacts area. Then, in the advanced options, you are able to specify whether you are creating new contacts, or trying to update existing contacts. If you choose to update existing contacts, the system will merge the import information, with the specified contacts already in the system. You can also add tags to the contacts and add them to a workflow, or campaign if needed. Once you have done all of this, you can just hit “submit”. Then as you can see, we now have both our new smart list of contacts, and the contacts in the main contacts area.
And that’s it! Now, you know how to import and export your contacts, so you can gather everything in one place, or use them in another program. You also know, how to update any existing contacts, without having to go through the effort of having to do this manually, one by one. Saving you time and effort, as always, through Web Geeks marketing platform.