Importing your database

Before you import your existing contacts, make sure you’ve uploaded your existing suppression list. You will have a suppression list if you’ve been using any other system to send out marketing emails and you will have to download it from that platform. For more information, please read  Manage Suppression List.

Another thing you want to do before you upload your existing list is to look at all the pieces of information you’ve been collecting and review them to make sure it is useful and actionable data you can use for your digital marketing. 

For example, you may have mailing addresses for your contacts. While that is useful information if you want to send them snail mail, in a digital marketing platform, you may want to limit that to importing only their postal code. Our platform automatically processes postal codes and assigns the correct city, county, state, and region in the US. We are planning to add support for other countries as well and will keep you updated as we roll those out. If you would like us to add a specific country, let us know and we can try to prioritize that. 

There are standard fields in our database that are hardcoded. Any other pieces of information you have on your customers that are not standard fields, you can add as custom fields. You can read more about them here:  Setting up standard and custom fields.

It helps to review and set up these fields before you proceed with your import because it will help the import go smoothly and provide you with clean data to use in the future. However, you can also create these on the fly during your import.

Before you import your data, make sure it’s in CSV format and review it to make sure you’ve reviewed fields for consistency. For example, if you have a date column in your list and the date is sometimes written as January 1, 2022 and sometimes as 01/01/2022, you will want to make sure they all follow the same format. If your field is a Yes/No type, you will want to make sure that all entries include either Yes or No (or are blank if you don’t have that piece of information for that particular contact) and don’t include any other terms. 

Once you’ve cleaned up your list, you are ready for import.

From the contacts page, click on Import and select Import Contact.

You can either import contacts from a CSV file or manage contacts individually. You will use import CSV file for loading large lists of contacts and you will use Manage Contacts for adding one or two contacts or editing existing clients. 
When you select your file, Oomiji will read the column headers and try to match them to existing database fields, both standard and custom. If they are named the same, they will be matched automatically and headers will turn blue.  If they are not named the same, headers will turn orange and you will see a label saying “(unmatched field)”.

When you click on the arrow, you can scroll through the list of existing fields and match it or you can create a custom field right then. Once you’ve matched all your fields, the continue button will turn blue and you will be able to click it. 
The import process includes the sanitization process during which all your emails will be checked to make sure they are valid. This helps you maintain a clean list which in turn helps you keep your deliverability rates high. This process depends on the size of your list and can take anywhere from a few seconds to up to an hour or more for lists with thousands of records. Do not close your browser window during this process.

Once the sanitization process is complete, you will receive a confirmation message with how many records were valid and imported or updated.