The CSV file uploader is useful if you need to import a large audience to your account. When uploading the file, you will be asked to map the CSV columns with default Retently properties or create custom properties that you will be able to use to segment your NPS campaigns’ audience.

On the Audience page, click on the Add customers button. You will be redirected to an inner page with all the options you can use to import your audience to Retently. Find the CSV import option and click the Upload CSV button.

You can either drag a file from your computer and drop it in the upload designated area, or simply hit the Click to upload button to choose the file from your computer. Only .csv format files are accepted. If you have your customers stored in a .xls file, open it in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets and export it as a CSV file. Make sure that the CSV file contains at least one email address.

Check our CSV file format guidelines.

On average, it takes about five minutes to upload and process a list with 1,000 rows. Therefore, if you're uploading a larger file, keep in mind that it will take a while until your customers are imported.
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If this is the first CSV file you import and your account does not have any custom properties yet, Retently shows one extra screen before the mapping table, called Create new properties.

It lists the columns that did not match anything built in, with a sample of their values, the name they would be saved under, and the property type. Tick the ones worth keeping and click Create. Columns that are mostly filled in and whose type is clear are ticked for you, and you can untick any of them, edit the name, or change the type.

Anything you leave unticked is not created, and you can still map it yourself on the next screen. Use the “Don’t create any” button to skip the step entirely.

Properties created here are already mapped for you when the mapping table opens, labelled “New property”.

This screen appears once. On later imports you can still create a property one column at a time from the mapping table.

Once the file is successfully uploaded, you will be asked to map the CSV columns (on the left) to Retently properties (on the right).

How Retently fills the mapping for you

You do not have to map every column by hand. Retently pre-fills as much of the mapping as it can and shows where each answer came from:

While this is running, “Looking for suggestions...” appears above the property column.

Retently only fills columns that would otherwise be left on Skip property. It never changes your email column, never overrides a column that was already matched, and never creates a property on its own.

To change or dismiss any of these, pick a different option from the dropdown, including Skip property. The label disappears once you have made your own choice.

You can select one of the default properties:

There are three properties that we have to discuss in detail:

After you have mapped all the data, click Next to proceed with the last step.

In this section you decide what happens when the same contact turns up more than once. These settings apply in two situations: when a contact in your file already exists in your Retently account, and when the same email address appears on more than one row inside the file itself.

When an email address is repeated within the file, Retently imports it as a single contact instead of creating duplicates. The rows are applied in the order they appear in the file, so the last row for that email address is the one that ends up on the contact, and the settings below apply to each repeat exactly as they do to a contact that already exists in your account.

There are two types of data that you can manage:

1. Customer properties - If a customer in Retently already has a value in a specific property, for instance, “Country”, and in the current CSV file the customer has another country listed in this column, you can tell Retently to perform one of the following actions:

Good to know: if your file contains no custom property columns at all, the custom properties already stored on your customers are preserved, whichever of the three options you pick.

2. Customer tags - If a customer already has one or more tags in Retently, and you have new keywords in the current CSV file, you can tell Retently to perform one of the following actions:

There are also a couple of additional settings:

1. Customer has been deleted in Retently - If you think that the current CSV file may contain records of customers that you already had in Retently but deleted in the meantime, you can choose to:

2. Add tags to imported customers - You can create new tags or choose from your list of existing customer tags to apply to all the customers that will be processed from the current CSV file.

Finally, confirm that the customers that you are about to import are legit and click the Import button.

The customers will start to appear in your account shortly. Although, if the list is large, it may take a while until all of them are imported.

Once your audience was imported to Retently, you will receive an email notification, which contains a brief report on how many new customers were added, how many duplicates were updated, how many repeated rows were found inside the file itself, and how many records failed to be imported. You can also download a CSV report with the failed records.

After you've added your contacts and matched all the properties between the file and Retently, you will be prompted to the Survey Settings page. By default, the option to send a survey to the imported customers will be switched off.

Once you switch this toggle on, you will be asked to choose the survey campaign and the time range within which you want to survey this list of customers. You can survey them immediately, or schedule the survey for a later date.

You can also control how many surveys are sent per day via the Daily Send Limit option. This allows you to batch the imported contacts and distribute surveys across multiple days instead of sending them all at once.

You have three options:

Contacts that don't fit within the daily limit are automatically postponed to the next day. This process repeats until they fit within a daily limit and receive the survey.

If you see a warning that your selected daily limit is too small, consider increasing it to ensure all contacts are surveyed within a reasonable timeframe.

Next, you can throttle the survey to those contacts to avoid over-surveying them. To do so, just turn on the survey throttle and chose the campaign and the throttle duration.

After you're done, just click the import button and the contact will be added and surveyed if you chose so.

Why my customers are not imported?

There might be a couple of reasons:

What happens if the same email address appears on several rows of my file?

Retently merges those rows into a single contact, so a repeated email address will not create duplicate customers. The rows are applied in the order they appear in the file, which means the last row for that email address is the one that wins. This works the same way wherever the repeated rows sit, whether they are next to each other or hundreds of rows apart.

This is useful when your export lists one row per order, per policy, or per subscription rather than one row per person. Map the columns you want to keep, and pick Add to existing tags if you want the tags from every repeated row collected on the contact instead of only the tags from the last one.

The email report you receive at the end of the import tells you how many repeated rows were found in the file.

A column was mapped to something I did not pick. Why?

Retently pre-fills the columns it can identify and labels them “From your last import” or “Suggested”. Nothing is imported until you finish the remaining steps, so review the mapping table and change any row you disagree with by choosing a different option from its dropdown.