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Import contacts from CSV

Import CSV, on the Contacts section of the CRM, takes a spreadsheet of people — an export from another CRM, a sign-up sheet, a customer list — and adds each person to your contacts. Someone already in your contacts is updated rather than added twice: the file's phone, title, tags and other details are merged onto the record you already have.

The address is …/hosts/{site}/crm/contacts. Importing needs the same Manage data permission as editing a contact.

Three steps​

  1. Choose the file. A CSV with a header row. Up to 5,000 rows per file — split a larger one and import the pieces. Nothing is sent until you press Import. Download template beside it hands you the export's own header over no rows — every field below, plus one column per custom field — so a sheet filled in against it maps itself.
  2. Match the columns. Each column in the file is matched to a contact field. Aglyn proposes a match from the header names (Email, Phone, Company, Tags and their usual variants) and shows the first row's value beside each one so you can correct it. Choose Do not import for a column you do not want. The email column is required; every other column is optional. A preview of the first ten rows shows exactly what each mapping produces.
  3. Import. Rows are sent in batches of 200 with a progress bar. When it finishes, the result says how many people were added, how many existing contacts were updated, and how many rows were skipped — with a Download skipped rows button that gives you those rows back as a CSV, with a last column saying why, so you can fix them and import that file again.

Closing the drawer during an import stops it after the batch in progress. Rows already imported stay imported; run the same file again to finish, and the rows from the first run are reported as updated.

What each column can hold​

FieldWhat is read
EmailRequired. Trimmed and lowercased; a row whose email is not a valid address is skipped.
NameThe display name.
PhoneStored in international format (+15125550123). A ten-digit number is read as US/Canada; anything else needs its country code. A number that cannot be read is dropped and reported. Importing a phone number never sends anything to it.
Job titleFree text.
Company nameMatched to an existing company of yours by name, or a new company is created — the result counts the new ones.
Address line 1, line 2, city, state or region, postal code, countryThe postal address. Country must be a two-letter code (US, GB); a spelled-out country name is dropped and reported.
TagsSeparated by , or |, lowercased. Added to any tags the contact already has.
OwnerThe email address of a member of your organization. An address that matches nobody on the team leaves the contact without an owner, and the result names those addresses.
Lifecycle stageOne of subscriber, lead, marketing-qualified, sales-qualified, opportunity, customer, evangelist, other — by id or by label.
Marketing consentyes, true or 1 records a marketing opt-in for this site, dated today. Anything else records nothing. This is your statement that the person agreed; it is not a substitute for their own opt-in.
Custom fieldsEvery custom field you have defined under Fields is offered as a target. A value that does not fit the field's type — a word in a number field, a choice a dropdown does not offer — is dropped and reported.

A value that cannot be read never stops the row: the person is imported without it, and the result names the values it could not keep, by field.

What is skipped, and why​

ReasonMeaning
Not a valid email addressThe email cell is empty or not an address.
Appears earlier in the fileThe same address is on an earlier row; the first row wins.
Contact limit reachedYour plan's contact band is full. Only the Free tier's band is a hard limit — see Billing & plans.
Could not be savedSomething went wrong writing the record. Try that row again.

A file the CRM itself exported — from the table's Export CSV or the bulk bar's — re-imports without a hand mapping: its header is this vocabulary, its owner column carries email addresses, and its Sources and Last interaction columns are proposed as Do not import, because the platform records those and a file cannot set them.

Every imported person shows Import as a source on their contact and "Imported from CSV" at the top of their activity. Contacts are shared across your organization the same way captured ones are: a person imported on one site is visible to that site (and any sites declared to be one sender with it), not to every site in the account.