Contacts in Dotdigital represent individuals who have interacted with your business in various ways, such as subscribing to your email list, making a purchase, or engaging with your content on social media. By adding contacts to your Dotdigital account, you can make the most of our features to create and send personalised and targeted marketing campaigns to your contacts.
You have two options for manually adding contacts to your account:
Add a single contact
You can manually enter the contact information for your contacts one by one. This is a simple way to add a small number of contacts to your account.Import a collection of contacts
If you need to add a larger group of contacts, you can import them all at once by uploading an Excel, CSV, TXT and ZIP file with their details. This method saves you time and simplifies the task of adding multiple contacts.
Before you start
Things you need to know:
When uploading multiple contacts, you can only import Excel, CSV, TXT and ZIP file formats.
When uploading mobile numbers, they must be in the international format.
International format
"+" + Country Code + (Area/Carrier Code without 0) + Phone Number.
Example: UK: +447700900000
Add a single contact
This example adds a new, single contact to the master contacts list.
To add a single contact to your account:
Go to Audience > Contacts, then expand the NEW CONTACT drop-down menu, and select Add contact.
Enter an email address, mobile number, or both for the contact.
For mobile numbers, use either international format or choose the correct country flag.
Select ADD CONTACT.
Add a single contact to a list
Go to Audience > Lists.
Find the list you want to add a contact to, then expand the Add contacts drop-down menu and select Add contact.
Enter an email address, mobile number, or both for the contact.
For mobile numbers, use either international format or choose the correct country flag.
Select ADD CONTACT.
Upload contacts to all contacts
Go to Audience > Contacts, then expand the NEW CONTACT drop-down menu, and select Import contacts.
For File, select CHOOSE FILE, and select the file you want to upload.
Supported formats: Excel, CSV, TXT and ZIP.
For Email address to notify, enter an email address, and we send you a notification when the upload completes.
Expand the Encoding type drop-down menu, then choose your encoding type.
UTF-8 supports most languages.
Select UPLOAD.
Under Data mapping, use the Map to contact data field drop-down menus to map your file column to a data field in your account.
Mobile numbers must be mapped tomobilenumberid.Select FINISH.
On the imports page, select report to view your contact import report.
Upload contacts to a list
Go to Audience > Lists.
Find the list you want to add a contact to, then expand the Add contacts drop-down menu and select Import contacts.
For File, select CHOOSE FILE, and select the file you want to upload.
Supported formats: Excel, CSV, TXT and ZIP.
For Email address to notify, enter an email address, and we send you a notification when the upload completes.
Expand the Encoding type drop-down menu, then choose your encoding type.
UTF-8 supports most languages.
Select UPLOAD.
Under Data mapping, use the Map to contact data field drop-down menus to map your file column to a data field in your account.
Mobile numbers must be mapped to
mobilenumberid.Select FINISH.
On the imports page, select report to view your contact import report.
Upload contacts using the scheduled importer tool
You can make use of our hosted and secure SFTP server to upload your data and automate file imports following a set schedule of your choice. It's the tool to use if you're looking to upload large amounts of data, or simply want to automate your uploads, whatever their size.
The changes to the tool for unified contacts are:
To access the scheduled contact importer
Expand the User menu and select Settings.
Go to Contacts > Scheduled data upload.
To create an SFTP user
Expand the User menu and select Settings.
Go to Access > SFTP users.
Data mapping
You can map columns in your import file to any contact data fields that exist in your account. You can also map channel identifiers for email and SMS.
Email addresses must be mapped to the email data field (as previously).
Mobile numbers must be mapped to the mobilenumberid field.
Import report
Once your import completes, select the Report icon to view the import report.
The import report shows you the total uploaded contacts, the number of new and updated contacts, and any contacts not imported. Select Export as CSV from the Contacts not imported section to find out why any contacts weren't imported.
The following table shows a list of reasons why contacts might fail to import.
Fault reason |
Contact Suppressed |
Phone number belongs to another contact |
Email belongs to another contact |
Contact email suppressed |
Contact phone number suppressed |
Contact email deleted |
Invalid Contact id |
Cannot unsuppress contact because it’s subscribed |
Cannot unsuppress contact because it is deleted |
Cannot unsuppress contact phone number because email is pending opt in |
Cannot unsupress contact contact phone number because it is unsubscribed |
Cannot unsupress contact email address because it is unsubsribed |
Cannot update suppressed channel with new identifier |
Cannot update pending channel with new identifier |
Cannot update contact with no channels |
Contact identified by multiple identifiers. |