In this lesson, we’ll be learning about Importing Data, so I have a spreadsheet here, which has 1,000 people in it that I need to upload to my CRM. If I scroll all the way down to the bottom, I would see I have 1,001 rows in my spreadsheet. The first row has column headings, and then we have 1,000 people. We have a few columns which contain data: Title, First Name, Surname, Email Address, and Gender. Each of these will map to a custom field which I’ve set up in my CRM. Let’s take a look at Alaine here. Alaine has two email addresses that we’re importing here, so these are separated by a semicolon, and we’re also labeling these as a work email address and a personal email address. We do provide a guide to the formatting you’ll need to use to make sure that your imports come through nice and tidy, which you can download under this video. So let’s head now over to our CRM to import this data.

To import our data  we’re going to come over to our Tools and Settings section, and we’re going to come to our Import data tool. There’s a link to our cheat sheet here, which has useful information about things like the format for dates, how to import multiple values, multiple email addresses, checkboxes – which should be 0 for unchecked and 1 for checked – tags, and we have a whole page on connections. So it’s always worth checking the cheat sheet if you’re unfamiliar with importing data or if you’re doing it for the first time in a while.

Let’s go ahead and import those people we were looking at. First of all, we’re going to choose what type of data we’re importing, and we’re going to choose People. We’re then going to go ahead and find the spreadsheet that we were looking at before. Spreadsheets are going to want to be in a CSV format. That stands for comma-separated values, and any spreadsheet software will be able to save data as CSV. Just bear in mind you can only save one sheet at a time to CSV, so make sure you are saving copies of your sheets so that you don’t lose sheets in your workbook. 

And we now come to the mapping screen. So this screen is all about mapping your custom fields to the columns in your spreadsheet. We have a couple of tick boxes at the top. The first one says The first row holds column names. Now, in our case, we did have column names in the first row of our spreadsheet, and the system’s correctly detected that and checked this for us. But if we did uncheck that, it would create a new person in the system called Title, First Name, Surname, which isn’t what we want, so we’re going to keep that ticked. We can also choose to Ignore duplicates based on email address. This is specifically for people. So if we have this checked and we upload people, but somebody already exists in the system with a particular email address, then it’s going to skip over them. For the purposes of this demo, I’m going to untick that option.

The next thing to do is look at our field mapping, and the CRM has had a go at mapping this for us based on the column names and our custom field names to try and match them up. So we can see that Title goes to Title, First Name to First Name, Last Name to Surname, and Email to Email address. So it’s matched everything up okay, except for this last column which it hasn’t mapped and is currently set to Ignore column, and that’s a Gender column on our spreadsheet. So, let’s have a look. Actually, we don’t have a Gender custom field, so we haven’t been able to match that up, and we can’t create new custom fields at this point. If you do have permission to add new fields, you could go ahead and do that before you complete your import, or ask a member of your team who has permission to add new fields. But we will go ahead and continue, just ignoring our Gender column.

The system is now going to be processing those 1,000 people, taking that data from the spreadsheet, validating it, and adding them to the CRM. Now, it’s useful to know how many people or things you are uploading. So I happen to know there are 1,000 people here, and when this process finishes in a moment, we’re going to see that number read out so that we know that everything has worked correctly.

We’ll just give it a moment more. And now we can see that those 1,000 people uploaded and the status is complete. If we’d ticked to ignore duplicates on the previous screen, we might see some slightly different numbers here, as the system will have skipped over creating any duplicate contacts.

If we go to the People section in the CRM now, we should have uploaded all of those new people. And I’m going to go ahead and search for Alaine in particular. This person had two email addresses, and we can see those two email addresses here. And if we click through to Alaine’s profile, we can see that they are labeled Work and Personal as we’d have expected. And if we edit Alaine’s profile, which we can do from this menu here, and we scroll down to the Email field, we’ll see that indeed those have come through as separate values. Just bear in mind that the field you’re importing to will need to support multiple values, in order for this to work.

Now we’ve completed a basic import. We’re going to look at another example now.

We have fewer people in this case. We have similar columns: Title, First Name, Surname, Email Address, Person Types (a tag field), and Organisation (which is a connection field in the CRM). We also have the Opted In which will be a checkbox in our CRM. So the checkbox is going to be 0 for unchecked and 1 for checked in our data. You can see we can have multiple Person Types tags separated by commas. And also we have the organisation that this person belongs to. What we’re actually going to be doing when we import this data is connecting it to some existing data in our CRM. So in this case, we want to connect our people to our organisations in the system. So let’s have a look at how that works.

We’re going to come back to Tools and Settings, Import data. We’re going to choose People again, and we’re going to go ahead and upload the spreadsheet that has the people with the organisations. And again, we’re going to match things together. So Title goes to Title, First Name to First Name, Last Name to Surname, Email to Email address, Person Type to Person Type. Bear in mind for tag fields that when we’re matching them up, they sit separately from the other fields in the system. So if you’re looking for them, just have a look below the main fields there.

We then have two columns at the bottom which haven’t been matched up. So one of those is our Organisation column, which I’m going to come to in a moment, and the other one is our Opted In column. Now, we do have a Marketing opt-in checkbox field here. The name is just different enough that it hasn’t picked it up. So a top tip is to name your column headers in your spreadsheet as similarly as possible to the names of your custom fields, and then the system’s going to try and match everything up automatically for you. 

With Organisation, it’s a little bit more complex. Organisation is a connection field in the CRM. So connection fields connect things together, and in this case, we want to connect a person to their organisation. We’re going to scroll down and we’re going to come to this Connect to section. And the first thing we want to do is find the Organisation connection field. So we’re going to keep scrolling until we see Organisation. But then we have to tell the system how to recognise the organisation we want to connect to. In this case, we’re uploading the name of our organisation in our spreadsheet. So we’re going to connect to the organisation via the organisation’s name. So in other words, the system’s going to look at the data in this column of our spreadsheet. It’s going to try and find an organisation with the relevant name, and then it’s going to connect this person to that organisation through the Organisation connection field. This name will need to match exactly, and your organisation will need to exist already – so just bear that in mind if you have multiple spreadsheets to upload, you’ll need to upload them in the right order to ensure any data you want to connect to already exists.

Okay, so everything is now mapped together correctly. I’m going to go ahead and click Continue, and we’re going to import these people into the system. We’re expecting six people this time. So let’s see how the figures look when this is all processed.

We can see that those six records have indeed come through. Let’s go and have a look at these people in the People section. Here they are at the top of our view. As you can see, these people are tagged, so we have various tags that have come through, and we can see that it’s saying that these people work at a particular organisation. So those connections have worked successfully. Let’s have a look at one example. We’ll look at Devan here. So Devan works at Youth Music. As this is a connection, we can click through to Youth Music to view Youth Music’s profile. Also, we can see that Devan had two email addresses, so they’ve come through as well. We can see that our Marketing opt-in is set to checked here, so all of our field data has imported successfully.