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.
Follow this tutorial to learn how to upload a CSV file:
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.
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.
Contact Properties
Once the file is successfully uploaded, you will be asked to map the CSV columns (on the left) to Retently properties (on the right).
You can select one of the default properties:
Email
Full name
First + last name
Last + first name
Company industry
Job title
Region
Country
City
State
Zip code
Time zone
Phone number
Tags
Skip property (this option will simply ignore the CSV column)
Custom property
There are three properties that we have to discuss in detail:
Tags: You can map multiple columns as tags. All the data stored in the column’s cells will be applied as customer tags that you will be able to use to segment them in campaigns or filter survey data. The cell can contain either a single keyword, or you can have an array of keywords, delimited by commas (each word will be applied as an individual tag to the customer).
Skip property: By default, the majority of your CSV columns will be mapped with this option. This means that no data from this column will be processed and imported/updated along with your customers. Feel free to use it if you want to skip one or more columns.
Custom property: If you can’t find a property that fits your needs, you can easily create a new, custom one. When selecting this option, you will be prompted a popup window asking you to give a name to the new property, and choose its type (text, number, date, or collection, which is recommended for an array of keywords). Once created, the property will store the data from the columns that it was mapped to, and you can use it to segment your audience in the campaigns. The next time you upload a CSV file, you will be able to select this property again.
After you have mapped all the data, click Next to proceed with the last step.
Here, you can decide how to manage duplicate records. A duplicate customer record is an email address previously imported to Retently and also present in the recently uploaded CSV file.
There are two types of duplicate customers’ 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:
Skip update: Our system will ignore this property for duplicate customers, and they will stay in Retently with the old data.
Overwrite with data from CSV: The data in the property will be updated to match the CSV file.
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:
Skip update: Our system will ignore the Tags property and will leave it unchanged.
Overwrite with data from CSV: The customer’s tags will be overwritten to match the CSV file.
Append new tags to existing ones: The customer’s old tags will be preserved, and only the new ones will be added.
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:
Do not re-add customer: The customer will be ignored and will not be added to your account.
Re-add customer after the sync: Our system will re-add the customer with the new data available in the CSV file.
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, and how many records failed to be imported. You can also download a CSV report with the failed records.
Schedule a survey
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.
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.
FAQ
Why my customers are 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.
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.
