For a successful import of your audience from a CSV file, please follow these recommendations while creating your file before uploading it to your Retently account.
Also read: How to import a CSV list with customers?
Make sure that it is a CSV format file (with the .csv extension). Other file types, such as Excel are not supported. If however, you have your customers stored in a .xls file, open it in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets and export it as a CSV file.
It is mandatory to have a column with your customers' email addresses. Also, make sure these addresses have a valid email structure (example@email.com).
It is highly recommended (although optional) to include in the file a few other columns for First Name, Last Name, or Company. Retently provides a list with default customer properties, such as Country or Job Tile, but you can also create custom properties for other types of data, for instance, your customers' signup date.
It is recommended to name your columns in the first row of your file. This will help our system automatically identify the right labels for your columns (ex: First Name, Last Name, Email, Company)
Make sure that your CSV file is encoded in UTF-8 characters encoding.
In a CSV file (Comma-separated values), the columns are usually separated by comma ",". Retently recognizes the majority of separators, but to make sure that the file is uploaded and processed successfully, it is recommended to use either the comma or semicolon separators.
For custom properties that have the type of date, Retently supports the standard ISO 8601 and RFC 2822 formats.
IMPORTANT: If your date columns include values with dates of the year 3,001 or farther, then our system will automatically edit and set the dates to the year 3,000 to ensure compatibility with our system.
It is important to keep in mind that there are no duplicates in the CSV file when importing it. The CSV uploader will successfully identify if the customer has a duplicate contact in Retently when importing a new one, but it can't identify duplicate contacts within a CSV file that is being uploaded, because our system has no reference for duplicates in the customer's account.
We recommend making sure that your CSV file doesn’t include any duplicate email addresses. You can do this easily in Excel or Google Sheets by applying the function Remove Duplicates from the Data menu.
You can follow these tutorials:
FAQ
Why are my customers not imported?
There might be a couple of reasons:
The format of the CSV file is not right. The most common issue might be that there isn't a dedicated column with email addresses.
If you have already had these customers added to Retently but then you have deleted them, then they will not be added back to Retently. Unless you instruct the CSV importer to do so. When uploading a new CSV file, on the "Settings" step, find the "Additional options" menu, and choose the option to "Re-add" customers that have been previously deleted.
Why is the name cut in half or incomplete?
The recommended format for importing Customer Names in Retently is by separating the First and Last Name into different columns in the CSV file.
Why does the file fail to upload?
There might be a few reasons for that:
There are many blank rows in the CSV file. When importing a file, make sure that it contains the mandatory fields- in Retently that’s the email. If the email address is missing or invalid, the customers will not import.
You might have enabled a firewall that blocks the ability to share personal user data with unapproved vendors. To solve this, contact your IT team to whitelist Retently, or use a different device.
The CSV format is outdated. This might happen if you have an older version of the Microsoft Suite. The easiest way to troubleshoot and fix this is by using Google Spreadsheets. Just upload your file and download it again as a comma-separated value.