Watch the video below for a brief overview of importing contacts:

Prepare your import file in Excel or Google Sheets or export it from another source.

View example contact list

At a minimum your file must include an email field, however, we recommend you also include additional fields that you can use for personalizing email messages. For example, importing "first name" will allow you to add a personalized salutation or merge this or other imported fields into the body of your messages.

If your import file contains duplicate records they will be automatically merged based on the email address. If your file contains records that are already in your Envoke database then imported fields will be updated for the existing contact records.

It's possible to use an external ID as a key field instead of the email address. This is an advanced setting, please contact support for more details.

You can bring over unsubscribed contacts into your Envoke account. You need to import these unsubscribed contacts in a separate CSV file, not mixed with other (subscribed) contacts. During the import process you will have the option to mark them as unsubscribed in Step 3. This way they will be added as unsubscribed contacts.

Fields for existing contacts are overwritten when contacts are re-imported, except for blank values. Fields are only updated, not deleted.

Tag and subscription assignments are cumulative. New tags and subscriptions are appended to records but never removed.

By default contacts are only added to your database during the import process. You can use the list sync option if you want to automatically delete contacts that don't exist on the current CSV file. Learn more.

Upload your list file from the import page, then follow the on-screen prompts.

On the import settings page you'll see a preview of the list. This provides you with a way to confirm the fields aren’t misaligned or scrambled. If the preview looks good you can continue to the next step, otherwise the file format needs to be fixed first.

Map fields from your file to the corresponding field in Envoke. You can also use the “Skip this field” option to exclude a field from the import.

Option 1: Assign all contacts you are about to import to one or more tags or subscriptions. This way everyone on the list will be assigned the same tag or subscription.

Option 2: Tags and subscriptions are indicated in a column in the import file. Each contact can have potentially different tags and subscriptions. Tag and subscription names must be separated by commas or semicolons.

Watch this explainer video to import contacts where tags or subscriptions are assigned in your import file:

Consent status

As the last step of importing your list, select consent status to indicate your relationship with the contacts you're importing.

After you click the Import button your file will be queued for importing. Importing generally takes only a few minutes.

You can track the status of your import from the imported files page. See the Status column for details. This page doesn't refresh automatically, click your browser's refresh button to update the status message.

You can click the number under the Contacts column to view a list of contacts who were imported. You can make changes to these contacts in bulk (for example to add or remove a tag or subscription or to change consent settings)

This is an optional field and applies only to contacts with implied consent that expires. You may include a field in your import field with the original consent acquisition date using a YYYY-MM-DD format and map this to the "Consent effective date" field. This way expiry of consent will be tracked from this date rather than the date of the import.

Map your original consent date to the "Consent effective date" field:

For security reasons and to maintain good deliverability across the system, import requests from new users may be flagged for manual review by Envoke staff. Manual review can take up 2 business days.

Contacts that didn't get imported due to an error (for example a syntax error in the email field) are saved in a separate file for your review. The words "rejected_records" is appended to your original file so if your original file is called "January List.csv" then any rejected contacts from this file are saved in a file called "January List - rejected_records.csv". You can download this file from the secure files folder.

If you're sending mandatory emails you can import contacts who need to receive mandatory content by checking the "These contacts must receive mandatory messages" checkbox on the import settings page. This will assign all imported contacts as mandatory message recipients. You can also designate specific contacts only from your import file as mandatory message recipients using a column titled mandatory_consent and marking relevant contacts with word yes.

If you're importing a country field, you must use ISO country codes and names. All other data in the country field will be rejected.

The language field needs to use the following values:

en or English

fr or French

es or Spanish

ar or Arabic

zh or Chinese

de or German

it or Italian

ja or Japanese

ko or Korean

pt or Portuguese

ru or Russian

All other values will be mapped with language = "other".

Consent statuses aren't updated for existing contacts by default.

If you choose to update consent statues for existing contacts, the updates are subject to restrictions on bulk consent updates.

Envoke doesn't make modifications to the uploaded CSV file and we aren't able to assist in correcting formatting errors as these are happening on your end when the list is being exported / downloaded. You may have to enlist your internal IT person/team to help with troubleshooting.

A common error is when apps - Excel is the main culprit but not the only one - create corrupt files with invisible formatting issues, often related to encoding. These invalid characters may look like a space or a � or a similar special character.

Google Sheets is our recommended list management / spreadsheet tool. It tends to show special characters that are not visible in Excel. We suggest you open the file in Google Sheets and check for extra characters, especially in the email fields.

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