Importing Contacts

Once you’ve logged in for the first time, and worked your way through the Initial Setup, the next step should be to import your contacts.

Without contact data in place, anything else you do at this point will be purely conceptual. With contacts in place, everything you do becomes real, and much easier to understand.

You can add individual contacts in several ways, all of which are fairly straightforward.

However, when we use the term “import contacts”, we mean bringing in an existing list from another system, typically something like Mail Chimp or Aweber, or a basic CRM like Highrise.

There are two stages to importing your existing list, and the first is prepping the CSV for import.

a. Preparing Your List

CSV stands for “Comma Separated Value“, opens in excel like an ordinary spreadsheet, but is in fact a plain-text format that can be read by almost every single platform on the market.

You’ll have to export your list from your existing system(s) in CSV format.

The vast majority will allow you to do this, although the cheaper the system, typically the harder this is to achieve. You may even have to pay.

When you have your CSV, open it in excel or google sheets.

The first row of each column of the CSV will be the “fields” in Infusionsoft, i.e. First Name, Last Name, Date of Birth, etc.

All subsequent rows will be used to create the contacts in Infusionsoft, and the contents of each cell will be added the field that is created by the first entry in that column.

Contact information reads left to right – so all the data in one row will be used to create on contact.

Infusionsoft has three options for addresses: Billing, Shipping, and a third “optional” address field. We can add multiple addresses at the same time:

We can also create tags from cell data. For example, we may want to create the tag “Mailchimp”, so we know that these contacts came from Mailchimp.

In that case, underneath the column header “Tags”, we would write “Mailchimp”.  We can also create multiple tags, either with multiple tags columns, or by separating tag titles with a comma; i.e. “Mailchimp,Event Attendee” will be used to create and apply two separate tags, “Mailchimp”, and “Event Attendee”.

Now that we have our CSV prepared for import, we go to Infusionsoft.

b. Importing Your List

From your dashboard, hover over the Cornerstone logo, and select Admin>Import Data.

On the next screen you’ll select the type of data that you want to import. In this case, the default will be the option we select:

On the next screen, we’ll select our CSV (download a sample here) and upload it to Infusionsoft.

Now, we’ll be asked to match the column headers in our CSV, to the fields in Infusionsoft.  Some fields will be recognised and automatically assigned. Others will require us to match them manually.

At this point we can create tags from field data, create custom fields on the fly, or assign columns to a pre-existing field.

Once you’ve matched your fields, click next. At this point, if Infusionsoft will automatically assign column data to the fields you’ve selected. However, depending on the type of field, Infusionsoft may ask you to confirm the match to make sure the data is correct.

Once we’ve double checked that the column data is being correctly matched, we can click next. On the next screen, we’ll be given a preview of the data we’re about to import.

If everything looks good, click next and your contacts will be uploaded, and you’ll be forwarded to this page:

Congratulations!