Before importing your contacts into Sarbacane Contacts, check your contacts' consent, your file format, your column names, and your previous unsubscribes and bounces (NPAI). Allow about 15 minutes: this preparation prevents import errors and protects your sending reputation from your very first campaign.
A Sarbacane Campaigns license (Sarbacane Contacts is included).
Your contact file and, if you are coming from another sending solution, your lists of unsubscribes and bounces (NPAI).
Check consent. Every contact must have agreed to receive your messages, and you must be able to prove it. Never import a purchased or rented list.
Best practice: collect new subscribers with a double opt-in, using a Sarbacane Forms form. Each sign-up is then confirmed by the contact themselves.
Prepare the file. Accepted formats: .xlsx, .txt or .csv, up to 100 MB. Sarbacane works best with .csv files using a semicolon separator. Put the column names in the first row.
Name the columns. Keep only one "email" column and only one "phone" column: these are system columns, and a duplicate can overwrite their data. To personalize your messages (first name, city…), add one column per piece of information.
Prepare the tracking pixel consent column, if you import it. Name it pixel: a column header containing the word "email" is not picked up during the import. Fill it with one of these pairs of values (consent given / refused), in upper or lower case: 1 / 0, oui / non, vrai / faux, true / false.
Best practice: use a single format throughout the file, preferably 1 / 0. This avoids typing errors and rejected rows.
Important: leave no empty cells in this column, and fix variants ("yes", an extra space) with your spreadsheet's find-and-replace function. This matters even more if you re-import an existing list: an unrecognized value can replace the consent already recorded.
Format phone numbers. Write them in international format (+33…). During the import, you can apply only one default country code to numbers that don't have one.
Retrieve your previous unsubscribes and bounces. If you are switching sending solutions, export them from your previous tool. Before your first send, import the unsubscribes into an unsubscribe list and the bounces into the Bounces tab of Contact lists. Sarbacane only detects your bounces after a first send.
Your file is ready to import. During the import, map the pixel column to the Email pixel tracking consent field. Once the import is complete, open a few contact records to check that consent has been recorded.
