Import your contacts from a CSV file

Bring the people your team already works with into ContactRoll in one go, from a spreadsheet or a file exported from another CRM. ContactRoll shows you, row by row, what the import would do before it writes anything.

Owners, Administrators and Marketers can import. Open Contacts and press Import from a file.

Step by step

• Choose the file. It is a CSV file whose first line holds the column names, with up to 2,000 rows and 5 MB. Files with semicolons or tabs between the columns, as some spreadsheets save them, are read as they are. Download an example file gives you a file with every column ContactRoll takes.
• Check what each column is. ContactRoll matches each column to a field by its name. Change any of them, or choose Leave it out. The fields are: email address (required), name, or a first and a last name, company, Phone (work), Mobile phone, Home phone, Other phone, status (active, trial or canceled), plan, sign-up date, and whether they agreed to marketing email.
• Choose what happens to people already here. A row whose email address is already a contact's is that person. Choose Fill in their blank fields only (the default), or Leave them as they are.
• Say what the file is for: contacts only; people who agreed to marketing email, with your evidence of how and when they agreed; or people who are each sent a sign-up form's confirmation and agree by pressing it.
• See what it would do. Every row is listed as New contact, Already here: blank fields filled in, Already here: nothing blank to fill in, Already here: left as it is, or Refused with its reason. Each company is shown as one already here or a new one.
• Press Import. ContactRoll imports exactly the rows and choices you saw, then says what it made and filled in.

If you change the file or a choice, the page asks you to see what it would do again first.

On the Free plan, your organization holds 1,000 contacts. An import that would take it past 1,000 is held back whole, so nothing is half imported. Before you import, the preview says how many rows fit and how many don't. Remove rows or upgrade.

Files from other CRMs

Files exported from HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and Zoho CRM are matched as they come, including their company or account columns and their phone columns.

Phone numbers

A number written without its country code is read in your organization's default country, set on Team. A number written with + and its code is read as that country's. A cell may hold several numbers, separated by commas or semicolons. A new contact gets every number on their row, and the first one (Phone, then Mobile, Home and Other) is the one to call first.

Rows that need fixing

Rows that would fail are listed together with their reason, for example "Row 2 · bad address: not an email address". Press Download these rows as a CSV file to get just those rows, with a last column, Why it was not imported. Fix them and import that file again.

Consent stays as it was

Agreement to marketing email follows the purpose you chose, row by row, with its evidence. Anyone who unsubscribed stays unsubscribed. Each import is kept on your organization's record, with the file's name, its purpose and what it made.