Airship’s Contact Uploader allows you to upload a CSV of email addresses to multiple groups and locations on your Airship account.
If your file has over 10,000 lines of data, send this to us securely (success@airship.co.uk) and we shall upload it for you instead!
Before you start:
GDPR, GDPR, GDPR! Make sure you have the customers’ consent for using and importing their data. See our tips on consent and GDPR.
We recommend you only import customer data for people who have opted in. However, if you have different consent types, such as opted in for emails but not for SMS, then you should add a column for each consent type and mark this a ‘Y’ or ‘N’ for each applicable row. If not applicable for a row, you would just leave the cell in that column blank.
Make sure you have the correct headers! Your spreadsheet should at least have either an ‘email address’ column and/or a ‘mobile number’ column.
The Console will automatically identify fake/incomplete email addresses and mobile numbers, prompting you to update these before completing the import. It is really important that you only import clean data. For more info on how to clean your data click here.
If the contacts are to be uploaded to different locations or groups, add Location and Group as columns in your file, then add the location and group name or IDs to the rows (these must already exist on the account as the data uploader does not create new groups/locations).
If you have other information such as date of birth or first name/last name, you can also add that too as a new column.
Your data should look something like the below:
Once you have your spreadsheet ready you can start the upload!
Here's Our Video Guide:
Log onto the Console.
From the left hand side click Tools > Contact Uploader.
Selecting where your data will be saved
From here you can choose how you want your data to be uploaded. The options are:
To one existing location and group or a new group.
Or if the file you’re uploading has Location (unit) and Group columns, you can select ‘Use Uploaded Location/Group’ options in the drop down list.
Choosing consent
The next section asks you to select the consent for email, SMS and postal mail. You can choose whether to opt-in/opt-out the entire spreadsheet, or use the information from your spreadsheet if you have multiple consent types.
If you have empty cells for consent in your spreadsheet these contacts will be opted-out when using 'use uploaded value'.
If your spreadsheet has contact data that is already in Airship, you might want to preserve the consent that’s stored in Airship. This way, if an existing customer has opted-out, it means that you are not overriding their consent by re-importing this contact as an opted-in contact.
Finally, when you are importing brand new contacts and you have your Welcome Email set up, you should tick this checkbox so all your new customers benefit from your offers and discounts.
Click ‘Next’ to continue.
On the next screen, choose your CSV file to upload. Other file formats are not supported.
Supported data format
The following headers can be included in your CSV and then mapped to Airship fields:
Gender
Title
First Name
Surname
DOB
Build Name
Build Number/Street
Locality
PostCode
City
Country
County
Group
Location (Unit)
Mobile Number
Email
Membership Number
Membership Type
SMS Opt-In
Email Opt-In
Mailer Opt-In
Click ‘Upload’ to start the upload process. Depending on the size of the CSV, this may take a while, keep your browser open in the background until it has completed the upload.
You will be asked to match the headers in your spreadsheet with the relevant headers in Airship.
If you have selected ‘Use Uploaded Location/Group’, the data mapping screen will also allow you to map these new headers to ‘Location Name’ or ‘Group Name’ (or you can choose Group ID/Location ID if your file has IDs and not names included).
Click ‘Next’.
If you have any errors in your file such as invalid mobile numbers or emails you will see them on the screen highlighted in red.
Remove or adjust any of these errors as appropriate before continuing with the process. Errors could include spaces after email addresses, mobile numbers with an incorrect amount of characters, or incorrect titles or postcodes.
Click ‘Save Changes’.
Then, click ‘Save Data’ and the message that the upload is being processed will pop up then.
Checking the Status
On the Contact Uploader page you can see the list of the upload files that have been submitted, when they've been created and whether they are 'Completed' or still 'Processing':
Once it is completed, you'll have access to the stats of the upload:
Total Uploaded - a total number of rows in the uploaded file
Contacts Added - a number of new contacts added to the database
Contacts Updated - a number of contacts updated on the database
Total Failed - a number of contacts failed to upload
And there you have it! Now that you have imported your contacts, why not check how to send your first email? Click here to learn how to do this.