How to Import Contacts and Improve List Hygiene in Sendrealm

A contact import should do more than move email addresses from a spreadsheet into a platform. It should preserve consent, produce a usable audience, and give your team a trustworthy starting point for every campaign that follows.

Sendrealm lets you add contacts to a static audience by pasting a small list of addresses or uploading a CSV. During a CSV import, you can map your source columns, follow processing progress, and see how many contacts were created, updated, or rejected. The platform handles the mechanics; the quality of the source data still depends on the decisions you make before and after the upload.

This guide explains both parts of the job: how to import contacts into Sendrealm and how to keep the resulting email list healthy.

What email list hygiene actually means

List hygiene is the ongoing practice of keeping an audience permission-based, reachable, relevant, and internally consistent.

A healthy list contains people you have a valid reason to contact, with an accurate subscription state and enough context to target messages appropriately. An unhealthy list often contains some combination of:

• malformed or obsolete email addresses
• duplicate rows and inconsistent formatting
• contacts whose consent cannot be verified
• previous unsubscribes, complaints, or hard bounces
• stale segments that no longer reflect customer behavior
• fields that mean different things across source systems

These problems do not only increase bounce risk. They also make campaign reporting harder to trust. If a broad import includes thousands of irrelevant or unreachable recipients, lower engagement may say more about the list than the subject line or offer.

Mailbox providers pay attention to recipient feedback. For example, Gmail recommends keeping the user-reported spam rate below 0.10% and avoiding 0.30% or higher. Careful acquisition, imports, targeting, and suppression all contribute to staying well below that threshold.

Choose the right audience before importing

Sendrealm supports static and dynamic audiences, but contact imports belong in a static audience.

A static audience is appropriate when membership comes from a defined list: attendees from an event, customers from a migration export, subscribers from a form, or another reviewed data source. You add or remove the members directly.

A dynamic audience evaluates membership from current contact data and targeting rules. Use it when people should enter or leave automatically as their properties or behavior change.

If you have a one-time file to upload, start with a static audience. If your real requirement is “all active trial users in Brazil,” define that as a dynamic audience instead of repeatedly importing snapshots. The latter reduces manual work and keeps targeting closer to current data. See Sendrealm Audience Segmentation and Contact Properties for more on that decision.

Prepare a clean CSV before you upload it

The safest import is usually the one with the fewest surprises. Review the source before opening the dashboard.

1. Confirm why every contact is present

Document where the list came from and what recipients agreed to receive. A customer account, an event registration, a newsletter form, and a purchased lead list do not imply the same permission.

Do not import purchased, scraped, or borrowed lists. Do not mark a contact as subscribed merely because the source system has an email address. If you cannot explain the acquisition source and intended message type, resolve that before sending.

2. Carry consent and opt-outs forward

A platform migration must not reset a recipient's choices. Export unsubscribes, complaints, hard bounces, and any topic-level preferences from the previous system before you migrate active subscribers.

Keep suppression data separate from the sendable audience and preserve the evidence your team needs for compliance. Importing an address creates or updates a contact; it does not turn an old opt-out into new permission.

3. Standardize the columns

For a Sendrealm CSV import, prepare columns that map cleanly to the supported fields:

The source column names do not need to match these labels exactly because you choose the destination during mapping. Clear names such as email, first_name, last_name, and is_subscribed make the review easier.

Use is_subscribed to set membership status when adding a contact to an audience. Do not use a later CSV import as an unsubscribe mechanism: a false value does not override an existing subscribed membership in that audience. Process opt-outs through your unsubscribe, preference, and suppression workflows instead.

Remove blank rows and columns you do not intend to use. Normalize obvious formatting problems, and check that each row has one email address rather than a comma-separated group.

4. Deduplicate by normalized email address

Treat email addresses as case-insensitive and trim surrounding spaces. Sendrealm normalizes imported addresses and rejects repeated normalized addresses within the same import, but cleaning them before upload makes the result easier to reconcile.

When the address already exists in the project, Sendrealm updates the existing contact instead of creating a second project contact. If the imported row omits a first or last name that is already stored, the existing value is preserved.

How to import contacts into Sendrealm

Once the source data is ready:

1. Open Audiences in the Sendrealm dashboard.
2. Create or select a static audience.
3. Select Import Contacts.
4. Choose Import Text for a small, verified list or Import CSV for a structured file.

Import a small list manually

The text option accepts comma-separated email addresses. It is useful for a small internal group, test audience, or another short list you have already verified.

Contacts added this way are treated as subscribed, so do not use the text option for a mixed list containing unsubscribed recipients. For larger imports or any source with individual subscription states, use CSV.

Import a CSV

Drag the CSV into the import dialog or select it from your device. Sendrealm reads the header row and shows the number of data rows found.

For each source column:

• select the destination field
• choose whether to include the column
• map exactly one included column to Email
• leave unrelated columns unselected

The email mapping is required. First name, last name, and subscription state are optional. Before starting the import, confirm that the visible row count matches the source file and that the subscription column uses the values you intended.

When you select Import, Sendrealm uploads the mapped records and processes them in the background. The progress view reports:

• rows processed
• contacts created
• contacts updated
• failed rows

This matters for large migrations because “upload completed” is not the same as “every row became a usable contact.” Wait for processing to finish and review the result.

Reconcile the import instead of assuming success

Compare the import totals with your prepared source:

created + updated + failed = total rows

Created contacts are new to the project. Updated contacts already existed and were reused. Failed rows can include missing or malformed email addresses and duplicate normalized addresses within the uploaded file.

If the failed count is unexpected, return to the source CSV and inspect it before attempting another campaign. Avoid blindly uploading the same file again: first determine whether the issue is invalid data, duplicate rows, or an incorrect mapping.

Then spot-check a small sample in the audience. Confirm names, email addresses, subscription states, and the final audience count. For a migration, compare the imported audience with the export from the previous platform and explain any difference.

Keep suppression separate from audience membership

An address can exist as a contact and still be ineligible for a particular send. That distinction is important.

Audience membership answers, “Which contacts belong to this group?” Subscription and suppression controls answer, “Should this message be delivered to this recipient?” Treating those as the same question is how old unsubscribes or delivery failures can accidentally return to a campaign.

Maintain suppression for:

• hard bounces
• spam complaints
• unsubscribes
• other recipient-level blocks required by your policy

Sendrealm keeps suppression controls close to delivery operations, but a suppression system is a safeguard, not permission to import low-quality data. Learn how these controls work in How Sendrealm Suppression Lists Protect Deliverability.

Build list hygiene into the full lifecycle

List cleanup should not be a rescue project performed only after bounce rates rise. Use a repeatable loop.

At acquisition

Collect addresses from clear, permission-based sources. Explain what a person is signing up for, record the source and time of consent when appropriate, and validate obvious input errors near the form.

Before an import

Remove malformed rows, deduplicate addresses, preserve subscription state, and separate contacts whose permission or status needs review. Use a small test file when the source format or mapping is new.

Before a campaign

Choose the narrowest audience that matches the message. Exclude recipients for whom the content is no longer relevant, and verify that marketing messages include the required unsubscribe behavior.

After a send

Review delivery, bounce, complaint, unsubscribe, and engagement signals. Investigate sudden changes by source, campaign, or acquisition period. A concentrated problem often points to one import rather than the whole database.

On a regular cadence

Revisit inactive segments based on your business cycle. A seasonal buyer and an abandoned trial user should not necessarily have the same definition of “inactive.” Reduce frequency, run a carefully targeted re-engagement program where appropriate, or stop marketing to contacts who no longer show a reasonable expectation of interest.

A safer migration checklist

When moving contacts from another provider, use this sequence:

• export active subscribers with their current consent stat

  e

• export unsubscribes, complaints, hard bounces, and other suppression

  s

• define how old fields map to Sendrealm

• remove malformed and same-file duplicate addresses

• import a small test audience firs

  t

• reconcile created, updated, and failed counts

• spot-check contact and subscription data

• verify domain authentication and unsubscribe behavior

• send first to a recent, engaged segment

• monitor delivery and complaint signals before expanding volume

Do not use a migration as an excuse to message the entire historical database at once. A technically valid address may still be stale or surprised to hear from you. Start with recipients who have the clearest permission and most recent relationship with the business.

Frequently asked questions

Will a CSV duplicate an existing Sendrealm contact?

No. If the normalized email address already exists in the project, Sendrealm updates that contact and adds or restores its membership in the selected static audience. Duplicate normalized addresses within the same import are counted as failed rows.

Does importing a contact bypass suppression?

No. Contact storage, audience membership, subscription state, and delivery suppression are separate controls. Preserve historical opt-outs and suppressions during a migration, and review delivery eligibility before sending.

Should I delete every inactive contact?

Not automatically. Inactivity should influence targeting and frequency, but retention also depends on consent, privacy obligations, business purpose, and the customer's lifecycle. Remove data you no longer have a legitimate reason to keep; do not confuse list hygiene with deleting useful customer context to make a database smaller.

How often should an email list be cleaned?

Continuously at acquisition and after every send, with deeper reviews on a cadence that matches your volume and customer lifecycle. High-volume senders should inspect delivery signals frequently; seasonal businesses need a window long enough to distinguish normal seasonality from genuine disengagement.

Clean imports make every later decision better

A well-run import gives your team more than a larger audience. It gives campaigns a reliable denominator, keeps consent decisions visible, makes segments more useful, and prevents avoidable delivery problems from entering the workflow.

Sendrealm makes the import itself straightforward: select a static audience, map a text list or CSV, monitor processing, and reconcile the results. The durable advantage comes from pairing that workflow with disciplined acquisition, suppression, targeting, and post-send review.

Open Sendrealm to create a static audience and import your first clean contact list.