Summary

Every email address you store in your account is known as a 'contact'.

Contacts can have all manner of data associated with them in addition to their email address, e.g. name, gender, birthday, where they live, their preferences and so on.

Contacts are stored in address books. These are used for organising your contacts and for choosing who to send campaigns to. Each contact in your account exists in one or more of these address books.

Your account includes two special address books:

• 'All contacts' includes all contacts in all address books
• 'Test' is the list of contacts you can test send campaigns to
  

This article will take you through the process of creating address books and adding and uploading contacts to them

Creating an address book

To create a new address book, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Contacts > My contacts.
   Your address books are listed in the main area of the 'My contacts' screen.
   
   
2. Click on New address book, located at the top of the 'Address books' tab, to be taken to the 'Create address book' page.
   
3. Give your address book a unique name. You can also add a description for it, and you can place it in the folder of your choice (if you've already created a folder for it; you can always do this later).
   
4. Once you've completed the relevant information, click Save.

You can now upload your contacts into the address book, or you can do this at a later stage should you wish to.

Adding contacts to your address book

There are several ways to add contacts to your address book. The main two are:

• Adding contacts one at a time using our online form
• Uploading multiple contacts in an Excel or CSV file

In addition, depending upon your account level, you may be able to import contacts from Salesforce.

You can also create a signup form to place on your website or use our API to insert contacts using other software.

Add an individual contact

When adding individual contacts using the online form, you can edit, create and fill in contact data fields for the contact.

When happy, click Save to store the contact's details. 

Creating a new contact data field

If you need to store additional data for the contact, you can create a new contact data field by clicking on the Data fields tab and then clicking on the New data field button. 

This will open the 'Create new data field' side panel.

Alternatively, you can go to Contacts > Contact data fields > My data fields and click on the New data field button to create a new contact data field. 

Read more about creating a new contact data field »

Add a list of contacts from an Excel or CSV file

When choosing to add a list of contacts from an Excel or CSV file, select the file to upload by clicking on Choose file.

You can set the following for the import:

• Email address to notify - Large imports can take a while; if you'd like to be notified by email when the import is complete, enter an email address here (the logged in user's email address is automatically populated).
• Encoding type - Our system defaults to the Latin alphabet. If you're importing email addresses containing Cyrillic letters, for example, then you might want to pick an appropriate character set encoding. Unicode (UTF-8) handles most characters, however.

When ready, click on Upload.

This takes you through to the data matching page.

Here you choose which columns from your file that you wish to import. This is done by selecting a matching contact data field from the dropdowns available, as shown below.

Leave the selection as - skip column - if you don't wish to import the column.

Select Add new data field if you want to create a new contact data field on the fly to match to.

When ready, click on Finish and the file will be imported into the selected address book, after being checked and cleared by our Data Watchdog.

If any records fail to import successfully, a faults file will be available for you to download.