Importing Your Contacts

In order to send out your survey email, you must first add contacts to your survey. Importing your contacts is easy using SurveyTown’s email feature. In a few simple steps, you can import your contacts to your survey email.

In this quick guide, we will cover how to import your contacts into your survey email.

Step 1 - Getting Started

Getting started importing your contacts is simple. Once you have designed your email, you will be prompted to move on to the next step. At the bottom of the design page, click “Import Contacts”.

Step 2 - Choose Your Contact Source

After clicking “Import Contacts”, you will be sent to the “Contact Source” page. Select the type of file you want to use to import your contacts. Here are the file types in which you can add your contacts:

Copy/Paste
Comma-delimited (CSV) file
Microsoft Excel (XLS) file
Microsoft Excel 2007+ (XLSX) file

If selecting the “Copy/Paste” method of importing your contacts, you will be sent to a page where you will be prompted to copy and paste your contacts. If selecting a file to upload, you will be sent to a page where it will prompt you to choose a file from your computer.

Step 3 - Map Your Contacts Through Custom Fields

Once you have uploaded your contacts, you are then prompted to map the data associated with your contacts to custom fields created inside of SurveyTown. You can map your contact data into custom fields such as name, age, email, and much more. If you need to create custom fields, go to Contacts > Custom Fields first and then re-import.

Step 4 - Review Your Contacts

After mapping your contacts, click the “Review” button at the bottom of the page. The review stage gives you one last look at your contact list and mapped fields by reviewing your contacts before sending out your email.

In this step, your contact list will be shown in the same format as was in the mapping stage. In addition, you can do a final preview of your email before sending it out. Click the linked text that says “Preview” to get one last look at your email before sending it out

Click “Send to contacts now” or schedule a time to send your email by clicking “send later”.

Step 5 - View Your Import Report and Summary

After importing your contacts, you will be shown a page that lists all of your imports. At the top of the page will be your latest import.

On this page your “Import Summary” will be broken down into:

Type - This is the method you used to import your contacts.
Action - When adding your contacts, you can choose to have the imported contacts be subscribed, unsubscribed, or updated.
Description - This will give a description of the method of importing contacts as well as the date and time the import occurred. You can click “View Summary” to get an in-depth look at the success of the imported contacts.
Survey - This is the given survey you have imported contacts to.
Contacts - This gives the number of contacts imported.
Status - This will determine whether or not your import was successful.

You can see a review of your import by clicking on the “View Summary” link that is in the row that details your latest import. An import summary will also be emailed to you.

Here is what the import summary looks like.

When clicking on the “Import Summary”, you will notice that the summary has been broken down into:

Status - Below “Import Summary” it will be indicated whether or not your import was a success.
Started - This is when the import began
Finished - This is when the import completed.
Total in Import - This will determine the number of total imports, and whether or not they have been filtered
Processed - This will be the total number of contacts imported after initial filtering.

From this processed list SurveyTown will then subtract out

Disallowed - SurveyTown will not allow role-based email address like [email protected] or [email protected]
Invalid - These are contacts who’s email address is malformed, meaning missing a correct domain extension, has invalid characters, etc.
Blank - These are contacts who’s email address is blank.
Duplicated contacts - These are contacts that are listed twice in your import file.
Left for import after screening - This will indicate the total number of valid contacts that can now be imported. There is one more check that must be done.
- Globally unsubscribed - SurveyTown will not import contacts that have requested to be Globally unsubscribed.
- Bounced - SurveyTown will filter out email addresses that have been sent to previously but bounced back to the email not being received by the recipient. Most commonly, bounced email address are due to old addresses that may be valid but has been deleted or is no longer receiving mail.
- Over quota - Each pricing level gives you a certain number of contacts you can survey. If you are over quota, you may want to upgrade your account so that you can survey more contacts.
- Already in your account - These are contacts that have been subscribed previously.
- Added to your account - This will be any newly imported contacts added to your account.