Importing Contacts

Importing Contacts

When you already have a contact list in a spreadsheet, ZingaConnect's importer brings it in, matches it against your existing contacts, and optionally drops the new contacts straight into lists and campaigns. It handles both CSV and Excel files.

The import steps

An import moves through four stages. You stay in control at each one, and nothing is written to your live contact book until you commit.

1. Upload

Choose your CSV or Excel file. The file is parsed in your browser and its rows are streamed to ZingaConnect in chunks, so large files upload smoothly without a single giant request.

2. Map columns

Tell ZingaConnect which spreadsheet column corresponds to which contact field. ZingaConnect suggests matches from your column headers, and you confirm or adjust them. Mappable fields include:

• First name, last name, display name
• Email, phone, WhatsApp number
• Email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing consent

Only the mapping you confirm is used — ZingaConnect never guesses silently on the server side.

3. Review the staged file (dry run)

Every row is staged and validated before anything is imported. ZingaConnect normalises values (for example, formatting phone numbers) and checks each row, then shows you a summary:

• Total rows in the file.
• Valid rows ready to import.
• Invalid rows, with the reason each failed.
• Duplicate rows — repeats detected within the file itself, matched by email or phone.

This dry run lets you catch problems before they touch your contacts.

4. Commit (runs in the background)

When you are satisfied, you commit the import. ZingaConnect processes it as a background job, so you can close the page and let it run — large imports do not tie up your browser. As it runs it:

• Upserts contacts — matching each row to an existing contact by email or phone and updating it, or creating a new contact when there is no match. Your shared contact book is not duplicated.
• Assigns lists — adds the imported contacts to the static lists you chose, and can create new lists as part of the import.
• Enrols campaigns — enrols the imported contacts into any drip or calendar campaigns you selected, independent of those campaigns' own audiences.
• Applies tags — attaches any tags you chose.

Because contact matching is by email and phone, re-importing an updated file safely refreshes existing contacts rather than creating copies.

Progress and results

The import batch tracks its own progress and final counts — how many rows were processed, created, updated, and enrolled — and records an error if anything went wrong, so you always have a clear record of what an import did.

A note on consent

Import respects the same consent model as the rest of ZingaConnect. Map the consent columns from your source data accurately: a contact will only receive marketing messages on a channel where they are consented and not suppressed. Importing a contact does not by itself grant permission to message them.