Transcript
Bring your existing contacts in from a CSV or another platform and start working them immediately — no manual entry required. This guide covers preparing your file, mapping fields during import, and what to do once contacts land.
If you’re importing a list from an existing CRM and your contacts all have information like their deals, their stages, statuses and pipeline progress, then select opportunities. If not, then just select contacts. Here we can upload our contact list in CSV format. To make sure that your list is formatted correctly, you can either download the sample file or click learn more.
Your files should look like this where you have headers for each property of your contact like phone, email, and their name. If you’d like to include additional emails or phone numbers, be sure to put a comma and a space between each item, and of course you can do the same thing with tags. Once you’ve selected your file, you can then choose how to import your contacts by either creating contacts, creating and updating contacts, or just updating contacts. If these are all brand new contacts, then simply click create contacts.
If this file includes a mix of contacts that are already in the system and new ones, select create and update contacts. And if this file only includes current contacts that are in the system, select update contacts. Then we can click next in the bottom of our screen. On this screen we’ll get a preview of our column headers and preview information to make sure that all of our fields are mapping correctly.
You can adjust field mapping on the right hand side by selecting the field from the list. Additionally, if you have any fields that are not mapped correctly, then be sure to create a custom field that has a title that matches your column header. I’ll show you right now how to customize your CRM so this maps correctly. All we need to do is create a new contact field by clicking settings in the left hand side, then navigating to custom fields and clicking add field in the top right hand side of our screen.
Then we can select the type of field that we’re adding, whether it’s a single line of text, multiple lines of text, different types of values, or multiple select options. For this case we’re using our favorite color, so we’ll say single line text, then click next. On this screen we can give our field a name, add our field to a group, and then click save. Now that we’ve done this, we can successfully map that information by going back to contacts, clicking that import button once again, then selecting our file, clicking next, and now you can see that our information maps successfully.
When your fields are mapped, simply click next. On this screen we can make our final selections like designating if we’d like to create a smart list for new contacts created by the import, which if selected will allow you to view this list specifically separate from the rest of your contacts. We can also add our contacts to a workflow or add tags to these imported contacts. When all of our settings are configured, we can select the checkbox below to confirm that all contacts in this import have consented to hear from us.
We can then select start bulk import. Your import will then begin, and after a specific amount of time based on the size of your list, you can refresh your page and see your list of contacts right inside your CRM. In future videos we’ll show you how to engage with these contacts one-on-one and in bulk, so stay tuned and thank you for watching.