This guide will give you a basic walkthrough of uploading Contacts/Customers into Jetpack CRM by importing a CSV file. If you need more CSV importing power, we recommend checking out CSV Importer Pro.
CSV File Formatting
As a first step, please make sure your CSV file is formatted correctly. You can read our guide on how to format your CSV here.
Upload your CSV File
There are a few ways you can get to the CSV importer that’s built into Jetpack CRM. From the top menu on any Jetpack CRM admin page:
- Go to Contacts > Import; or
- Go to Tools > Data Tools > Import from CSV; or
- Hover over your Gravatar (profile image) at the top right, and go to Data Tools > Import from a CSV.
However you got there, you should see a page called “CSV Importer Lite, Step 1: Upload”. Follow these steps to import your CSV file:
- Click the “Choose File” button, and select your CSV file.
- Click the “Upload CSV File” button, which should bring you to the “CSV Importer Lite, Step 2: Map Fields” page.
Map Your Fields
Next, you’ll be presented with a series of dropdown lists, where you’ll tell Jetpack CRM which of your spreadsheet columns should be mapped to which Jetpack CRM contact fields.
As you can imagine, this is an important step since it hugely affects what data is imported, and where it gets added within each contact. For example, you don’t want a telephone number being added as an email address in Jetpack CRM.
Click here for a full guide on mapping fields in CSV Importer
If your CSV file has a header line, meaning the first row contains titles for each column, you must enable the “Ignore the first line of CSV file when running import.” option. This will prevent your title row from getting imported as a customer.
Go through the list and map each item. Jetpack CRM assigns “Ignore this field” by default. You can leave that setting for any field you do not want to import. You’ll need to map at least one field in order for the import to work.
When you’re done mapping each field, click the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page.
If you want to import tags with your customers, read our guide on that here.
Verify Your Field Mapping
Jetpack CRM will now show you a summary of what will be imported, including a list of all the field mapping you assigned in the last step.
Double-check that everything is correct. If you need to change anything, go back to Contacts > Import and start the process again.
Once you’re sure everything is correct, click the “Run Import” button at the bottom of the page.
Note: It’s not possible to undo a CSV import, so it’s incredibly important to make sure everything is correct beforehand.
Import Complete
Once the import has been completed, you’ll see an “Import Complete” message.
Click the “Finish” button to close the import tool. This will bring you to your main Contacts page, where you can view all the contacts you just imported.
The number to the right of each customer in the log (like #9977) is the customer ID for the imported customer.
The “date added to CRM” will always be the date of the import since that’s the date the contact was imported/added to Jetpack CRM. It’s not possible to change that. However, if you need to keep track of a separate date, you could add a custom field with that date.
Important! A contact’s unique identifier is the email address. Importing a new file with contacts already in Jetpack CRM will not recreate those contacts. It will, however, update the existing contacts with data in the CSV file.
FAQ
I don’t import customers frequently. Do I need to keep the CSV Importer Pro plugin active?
Unless you regularly import customers, you can safely deactivate the CSV Importer Pro plugin. By doing so, you’ll save one or two milliseconds when loading Jetpack CRM pages.
What happens if you import a CSV file with a contact that already exists in Jetpack CRM? Does that create a duplicate contact? Will the data be overwritten?
The CSV Importer determines duplicate contacts by email address. If the newly imported contact data is a duplicate (it has the same email address as an existing contact), the existing contact will be updated with the data from the CSV import (except for the email address).
Can I add multi-line content?
There is currently no way to import multi-line content and preserve the line breaks. This means that multiline text data will be flattened.
A workaround is to remove the line breaks before import and replace them with some other markup in the text content. The content could be left like that in Jetpack CRM or then altered after import via a script.
How can I speed up the CSV import?
If you have a large number of contacts to import, especially if that includes contacts with custom fields, there are some tips you can consider using:
- Increase max execution, memory limit, and server max upload filesize limit.
- Perform an initial import with fewer data, then update those contacts with the additional data (e.g. custom fields) later. This would result in an initial “basic” import of the contact data with less data (meaning not complete). Still, you will get that done slightly earlier.
- Find out if anything else is consuming resources on your server while importing contacts. For example, background tasks, possibly from other plugins. Anything you can pause would likely help.
- Running the latest versions of PHP may speed things up. Even upgrading from PHP 8.2 to 8.3 results in a 7% speed increase in PHP performance.