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Importing contacts

Bring a spreadsheet of contacts into Nest in three steps, and avoid the common mistakes.

Before you start

  • Only the workspace owner can import contacts.
  • Importing isn’t available on the Free plan. See Plans, usage and billing.
  • Your file needs to be a CSV. Most spreadsheet apps can save one via Save as or Download.

Prepare your file

The easiest way is to start from our template:

  1. Open Contacts and select Import. You’ll land on Import Contacts.
  2. Select Download Template. It has the columns Name, Email, Phone, Company, City and Tags.
  3. Fill it in, one contact per row.

Your file must have these columns:

  • name
  • email
  • phone

You can also include any of these:

  • company
  • city
  • state
  • country
  • contact type
  • lifetime value
  • tags – separate several tags with semicolons, for example vip;newsletter

Nest matches your column headings automatically, and doesn’t mind capitals or spacing, so Email, email and EMAIL all work. Any other columns are ignored.

Import your contacts

The import has three steps: Upload, Preview and Complete.

  1. Upload – choose your CSV file.
  2. Preview – check that the contacts look right. If something’s off, go back, fix your file and upload it again.
  3. Select Import (the button shows how many contacts will be added).
  4. Complete – Nest tells you how many contacts were imported and how many failed.

Things to watch out for

Note Nest doesn’t check for duplicates when importing. Every row creates a new contact, even if that person is already in Nest. Remove anyone you’ve already added before you upload, and don’t import the same file twice.

Tip Import in batches of about 100 rows. Larger files can partly fail because of rate limits. If you have 500 contacts, split them into five files and import them one after another.

  • Rows missing a name, email or phone are skipped. Fill in the blanks and import those rows separately.
  • Failures are counted, not listed. If the summary says some rows failed, compare your file with your contact list to find which ones are missing, then import just those.

After importing

Your contacts appear on Contacts straight away. Now’s a good time to build some segments around them. See Segments.

Was this helpful? Tell us what’s missing with the feedback button in any module, or email support@oroe.ai.