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👥 Import participants from a CSV file
👥 Import participants from a CSV file

Import an existing list of contacts as participants to your campaign

Fivos Stergiannis avatar
Written by Fivos Stergiannis
Updated over 4 months ago

The best way to kickstart your Viral Loops campaign is to use an existing list of contacts. These people already know you and can act as your first referrers when you need them the most - at the beginning of your campaign.

If you have a CSV file of these contacts, you can import them as participants to your campaign so they start referring to others. 

To do that, go to the Campaign Dashboard and click "Import".

The imported participants go through the same processes as if they had joined your campaign in any other way:

  1. Enabled integrations (eg. Mailchimp) will be fired. 

  2. If the Welcome email is enabled, it will be sent to the imported participants. The same goes for Successful Referral email and Milestone emails.

  3. Imported participants will appear in your Campaign Dashboard, campaign export, etc.

Some things to note

  • If you are importing in a Leaderboard Giveaway or Startup Pre-launch campaign, participants will be imported at the bottom of the current leaderboard or waitlist.

  • Imported participants will affect your quota and your subscription will be automatically adjusted to the appropriate plan for the total number of participants in your account. Before starting the Import you can see how your plan will be affected.

  • You cannot undo an Import once it has begun.

File requirements

The CSV file can have these columns:

  • email

  • firstname

  • lastname

  • referralCount

  • [Custom field data name]

The only required column is "email" - the rest are optional. This means that the minimum valid CSV would be like this:

email
richard@piedpiper.com

These are the requirements of the CSV file:

  • The column names are case-insensitive. This means that "firstname" is equal to "firstName".

  • Only the email column is required.

  • The file should be a .csv file. The delimiter should be comma ",".

  • There should be no empty rows. Also, the last line of the file should not be empty.

  • Invalid email addresses will be ignored.

  • Name of Custom field data or uuid as shown inside the Campaign wizard preferably. The data are case sensitive

No missing values

If a row is missing a column’s value, then an error is returned. For example, when columns are email,firstname,lastname, you cannot skip the firstname value. It should be an empty string at least, like so: “”

This is OK:

email, firstname, lastname
test1@viral-loops.com, "First1", "Last1"
test2@viral-loops.com, "", "Last2"
test3viral-loops.com,,

This is not OK:

email, firstname, lastname
test1@viral-loops.com,  //notice there's a comma missing
efi@viral-loops.com, "Efi", "test"
alex@viral-loops.com  //no values for the other columns

Importing from a Viral Loops campaign

To import participants from another Viral Loops campaign, follow these 2 steps:

  1. Go to the dashboard of the past campaign and get a CSV export.

  2. Import it to your new campaign.

Notes:

  • We accept only 2 CSV file types, text/csv and application/vnd.ms-excel. In case you get an "invalid file type" error though your file is a CSV, it means that your file is not one of the accepted 2 CSV file types.

  • Importing participants will create new referrals codes for each participant, whether these participants are new or are being re-imported from a previous campaign.

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