Importing Customers to Yotpo SMS & Email

Quickly add existing customers and subscribers to your Yotpo audience lists.

In this article, you'll learn how to upload a CSV file containing customer data to create new audience lists segmented by SMS, email, or both.

How it works

Yotpo allows you to effortlessly import all of your customers, subscribed or not, in one go by uploading a CSV file with the necessary data. If you are importing SMS subscribers, our support team will review your list to make sure you are fully compliant with all existing regulations.

Before you start

For a successful import, you’ll need to export a CSV file from your previous provider or create a new one from scratch. The file must include each customer’s email address or phone number.

Importing your customers

To import your customers:

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Audience > Lists & Segments.

2. Click Create audience.

3. Select Create from a list and click Create audience.

4. Select CSV file from the available options and you’ll be taken to the Import page.

Tip:

After you click Create audience, your list will be named by default. You can click the edit (pencil) icon next to it to change it.

Uploading a CSV file

For maximum flexibility, the columns in the file you upload can be arranged in any order, with your preferred headers, and include any necessary information. Just make sure that the data is formatted according to Yotpo’s guidelines. To avoid issues during the import, your CSV file must be saved in UTF-8 encoding. It allows text to be stored and displayed in different languages by using a flexible system that can represent a wide range of characters and symbols.

Important:

The column headers in the CVS file must be placed in the first row of the table.

File guidelines

The following table lists supported formats for commonly used data types such as phone numbers and dates:

After you have completed formatting your file, you can upload it by following these steps:

1. On the Import page, upload your CSV file and click Next.

After the upload is complete, all the data will be displayed in a table:

• Column Header: The name of the header as it is in your CSV file

• Example: Examples for each column taken from your CSV file

• Yotpo Field: The name of the corresponding Yotpo field. The columns from your CSV file will be automatically matched to the existing Yotpo fields.

Please note:

If there isn’t a corresponding Yotpo field to match your column header, for example, “Clothing size”, you can create a custom one by selecting Create new property from the drop-down menu.

• Data Type: The data type of the Yotpo field. You can change the type from the drop-down menu for custom fields only. The options are: “text”, “number”, “date”, “boolean”, “email”, “phone”, “country”, and “list” which allows you to add multiple values to a column.

Tip:

We highly recommend using the ISO 3166 format when importing country data to make country segmentation easier. Otherwise, you'll need to map this column as a custom profile property with the "text" data type.

2. Select the columns you want to import and click Next.

3. Select whether the customers you want to import are subscribed to SMS, email, or both.

Please note:

If you choose SMS, you may need to specify how you collected your subscribers so our support team can make sure you’re compliant. Select a service and tool from the drop-down menus. You can also add a screenshot of the tool (optional).

4. Mark the checkbox to confirm that you are compliant and click Import customers.

The list will appear on your Lists & Segments page. If you're importing SMS subscribers, our team will review your list. To check the status of the review, hover over the list and click View customers.

Partially successful import

In case we weren’t able to import all customers in your CSV file, you’ll be notified that the import was completed with errors. You can download the error report by hovering over the upload date and time and clicking the Download file button that appears.

The error report will highlight the rows where errors occurred and describe the error, for example, “Phone number is formatted incorrectly or invalid”.

Please note:

The customers who were successfully imported will not appear in the error report.

Next steps

After successfully completing the import, you can start sending SMS and email campaigns to newly imported customers who have agreed to receive marketing messages. Just click the 3-dot menu and select Send campaign. To learn more, see Creating an SMS Campaign and Creating an Email Marketing Campaign.