- Hey, everybody! Welcome back.
In this video, I'm going to be showing you how to add
and import contacts to your audience in Mailchimp.
Stay tuned, it's coming up next.
(smooth music)
Couple of things before we start.
Make sure that you have permission to upload
contact information to Mailchimp, and the second thing is,
start with a spreadsheet.
It will make your life so much easier to import
or add, copy and paste contacts into your audience list.
So start with those two things.
Make sure you have permission and start with a spreadsheet.
And I'm in a test audience here.
We have zero contacts, zero subscribers,
so what we're going to do is start adding some.
Now, the way you do that is by going into add contacts
and clicking that dropdown, or just click on add contacts,
And you have a couple of choices here.
Let's take a look at add a subscriber.
Here you can add one subscriber at a time.
So maybe it's a one-off type of customer or client,
you've asked permission, they said yes,
and you can add in all their information, okay?
The only field that is required by Mailchimp, obviously,
is the email address.
Everything else is up to you,
and what you want to use the information for.
Remarketing, or keep in touch with clients or contacts,
or that type of thing, okay?
So that's one way you can do it.
Going back to our audience dashboard here
and clicking on import contacts,
so this is your other option.
Well, here you have two choices.
You can upload a file, a CSV, or a tab-delimited text file,
or you can copy and paste.
Now, a CSV file is a specially formatted to file.
Again, this is a reason why you want to start
with a spreadsheet, because you can easily convert
Excel or Google Sheets and save it as a CSV
or a tab-delimited text file.
The other way you can do it is copy and paste.
So let's start with copy and paste.
Continue to upload.
So Mailchimp is saying, okay,
it should look something like this.
Notice that they have column names at the top
and the information, so that's your example to go by.
Well, let's go over to our spreadsheet here
that I've created.
I've got Moe, Larry, and Curly here.
And what we're going to do is just going to copy,
not just the information here, but the column names as well,
so Mailchimp can identify what column is what.
So we'll just copy, go over to Mailchimp,
and paste it into the box.
So a Mailchimp automatically recognizes
that there are four rows and can determine
that there are two columns.
So we'll click on continue to organize,
and everything looks good,
so it's going into the testing audience.
I can change that if I wanted to.
The status, it will keep it as subscribed.
There are other options here as well.
And if there are any people that are already existing
in this list and you're updating their information,
you can check this box.
So we will just ignore that for now,
and then we'll click on continue to tag.
Notice that there is no other segmentation option here.
The only option you have is to tag.
Now, you can create a tag here, and I already have a tag
called staff that's associated with this list.
I could use that, I could create one here,
or I could choose from the popular tags.
You can have as many tags as you want for people
that you're importing.
In this case, I'll stick with our staff tag here,
and we'll continue to match.
So what is matching is, what do you have
in your audience settings merge fields?
Well, what is that?
So let's go take a look at that
before we click on finalize import.
So we're back into our audience here,
and we'll click on settings and click on audience fields
add merge tags.
You'll see here that I've got some things in here,
and we have email address, which is required,
first name, last name, address, phone number,
and the phone format.
These are the fields that Mailchimp is matching
when you import contacts.
So if we go back over here, it says, okay,
we've got email address and first name,
that's what you're importing, you're not importing
anything else, and everything matches to what you have
in your audience fields, all good.
So we'll click on finalize import,
and it'll say three contacts have been added
to your testing audience,
and then we can click on complete import.
Now, if we click on view imported contacts...
So, everything looks good.
We have first name, we have email address,
we have our tags, and they're subscribed.
And it also lists the source and the date added.
All good.
Well, let's say we want to update our existing contacts
that we have here.
We'll go back to our Google Sheet here.
And let's say we want to add in more columns
and some more data.
Let's say we want to add in a birthday,
let's say we want to add in start date.
and let's say we want to add in whether my staff
is full-time or part-time.
So for birthdays, I know I have Larry's birthday,
and I have Moe's start date.
Notice I'm not formatting these columns.
So basically, to Google Sheets, these are text,
but when we go to import, we'll change them.
And for full time, we'll say that Curly is yes full time,
and Larry is no full-time, okay?
So now let's copy this information, okay?
We have it copied.
Go back over to our subscribers,
click on add contacts again, import contacts.
We'll do the copy and paste again,
continue to upload, we'll paste in our information,
we'll click on continue to organize.
Now what we're going to do is click on
that update any existing contacts,
and we'll match the email address with any existing contacts
and update the information.
So we'll click on continue to tag,
we'll add the staff tag again,
even though we didn't add anyone,
but we'll just add it here and see what happens.
We'll click on continue to match,
and Mailchimp's going to put up a little stink here,
because it's saying, hey, I don't have this birthday
and start date and whether you're full time,
what's going on?
So what you have to do here when you see that
is that you have to verify what this is,
and if you want to add it.
So we'll click on here,
it says edit the column name to resolve this error.
So we'll click on that, and your option is to designate
an existing field that you have in your audience
field settings, or add a new field.
And that's what we see here, create a new field.
So we'll click on that.
We'll give it a field label as birthday,
and instead of text, it will be a date.
This is where we change the formatting. Click confirm.
We're all set with that one.
Now let's click on start date.
Same thing. Click on create a new field,
put in a field label, start date,
and also change that to date.
Click on confirm.
Last one. Full time, click on that one, create a new field,
and here we're going to call this full time,
and we're not going to obviously change it to date,
we're going to keep it as text.
Click on confirm.
Now Mailchimp is all happy.
We have no red flags.
We're going to import these new columns and new information,
so we're going to click on finalize import.
It says three contacts will be updated.
We'll click on complete import.
Let's click on the view contacts this time.
So we now have extra information associated
with the contacts that we've already had in our list.
And notice that it didn't add an extra staff tag.
It recognized that there was already a tag called staff,
so it didn't add another one,
there's no tags that say staff staff.
But we have our start date now, we have full time
or not full time, we have our birthday here for Larry.
All looking good.
The last one I want to show you
is when we import a CSV file.
So we'll back to our demo.
Here's our list.
So now we're going to add in Shemp.
I've already copied it from elsewhere,
and we're just going to paste it in real quick,
save us some time.
Okay, so we've got first name, we've got a birthday,
we've got a start date, and full time.
Now, what we're going to do here is we're going to go to file
and go to download, in this case,
and if you're from your desktop or PC, Mac,
if you're on Excel, then you'd select save as.
And in our case, we're going to save as or download as
comma-separated values.
Also note you can do tab-separated values.
So click on comma-separated values, click on save file,
go back over to our audience, do the same process,
click on add contacts, import contacts,
and instead of copy and paste, we'll do upload file.
Click on continue to upload, click browse,
click on the CSV file to upload it,
and then click continue to organize.
It's going to our testing audience.
We're going to add the subscribed status.
We'll click on update an existing contacts,
even though we're not adding that,
but it's a good thing just to check off by default,
and click on continue to tag.
Now, since we are adding Shemp, we do want to click on staff
to create our tag for that new contact,
and we'll click on continue to match.
So we'll click on finalize import
and click on complete import.
View the contacts, and we now have Shemp.
Right here, birthday, start date, and our tag of staff.
The other thing I want to share with you,
let's say you have your entire audience
that you want to update.
Maybe you want to update everybody with the same tag,
or different tags, that type of thing.
What you can do there is you click on
the export audience button here.
It will download a zip file.
You unzip it, and in there you'll have your subscribed
CSV file that you can then add it through Excel
or Google Sheets or what have you.
And from there, you'd make all the changes that you'd like,
adding the tags, obtaining information,
and then do the same process that we just did.
Go to add contacts, import contacts, upload CSV file, okay?
Thanks so much for watching.
If you have any questions, post them in the comments below
and I'll answer them to the best of my ability.
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Thanks! Take care, and I'll see you in the next video.