Contacts: import a list from a CSV or Excel file

Getting a list into Bird no longer needs a developer. Import on the Contacts page now takes a CSV, TSV or Excel file of up to 50,000 contacts, reads the header row to work out which column is the email address and which is the phone number, and shows you the first rows as the contacts they will become before anything is written.

Until now the dashboard took contacts pasted one per line as email, first name, last name, so anything that was not already in that exact shape meant editing a spreadsheet by hand first, and anything with custom fields meant calling the API. Most lists arrive as an export from another tool, with the columns that tool happened to name.

What's new

• The columns are matched for you. "Email Address", "E-Mail", "Correo electrónico" and "email_address" all land on the email field, and a single column holding a whole name is split into a first and a last. Where two columns could fill the same field, the one whose values back up its name wins. Every match is a dropdown you can change.
• You see the contacts, not the file. The preview shows the first ten rows as the contacts they will become, so a name column splitting the wrong way or a date reading as text is something you catch before you commit rather than after.
• Rows that cannot be imported say why, and where. Each one is listed with the line number to open in your own file and what is wrong with it, both on the preview and again when the run finishes. Nothing is skipped silently.
• Custom properties and audiences come along. Any column can map to one of your typed contact properties, and everyone in the file can be added to one or more audiences as part of the same import.
• Re-importing is safe. Each row is matched against the identifiers it carries and updated, so importing a corrected file updates the contacts rather than duplicating them.

Importing and syncing contacts covers the flow. To sync from your own database instead, POST /v1/contacts/batch still upserts up to 1,000 contacts a call and now accepts 30 calls a minute.