Importing Contacts from an Excel - Video Guide

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You can import your contacts into VBOT using a basic CSV file

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The way you do that, on the left panel, you can go to your contacts section and click on this gear icon and import contacts

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Now I also have another screen where I can do the same by going to my list from the top, finding out which list I want to import to, and from the drop down do mass import

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You'll see that on VBOT we let you do the same thing from different screens for your convenience

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Now what I do recommend before you start the import process is to create your master list on VBOT and include all the fields that you'd like

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First name, last name, email, company, number of employees, whatever really you'd like to capture, and make sure you have the proper data type, is it a date field like this one, what would you like to start, or is it a text field

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Always, always choose the right file or format of fields to import

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Once you've done that, load up your Excel, make sure it's a CSV format, and try to match if you can all the different columns that you have

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Now in this case, I did create some things to match and others that are not existing on VBOT, just to show you how you can create them on the go

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Now there's an email column here

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If you don't have emails and you're simply importing a list with phone numbers to do SMS, or for other management purposes, make sure that you turn off the required option under email address field

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You cannot remove it, but you can turn it off It's a required field by default, so make sure you get that setting on and then you can initiate the import

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Once you've matched and you've formatted the file in CSV, you can go ahead and initiate the mass import process

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The file has header, that means my Excel has a title on column one, and if any contact exists already, I would like to update it

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I'm going to choose the file and click Next

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Now you're going to notice here, it's trying to map the data My Excel has a company column

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On VBOT, I didn't create a company column I have something called company name, and VBOT couldn't really just match the name

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If you have the Excel file with the exact same labels, we will be able to match it

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Service date is, I can map it to, when would you like to start the service? Deal value, I do not have it in the system

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So because it's an amount, I'm just going to map it to a text field, but if it was a date, I probably should map it to a date field

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So please make sure you make the distinctions between your date fields and your text fields

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Maybe I don't need full name, I have full first and last, but if you'd like to capture it, I can just create a new field for that

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The phone number was mapped, that was easy, and the email was mapped

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And import You'll see this thing, pending import, we're going to literally vet every column and every type of data, every character,

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and there are thousands of different things that could go wrong with your Excel, so we really filter out a lot of the stuff, and we produce the end results under your contact section

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So you can see my contact editor right here, with the company name, and the rest is being imported

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Now because I use the same email across the board, it might not have allowed me to import it multiple times

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Another way to trick the system to do that is to go to Reform Builder, Settings, and click Allow multiple submissions from the same contact and Save

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And that's pretty much it

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