Importing a CSV contact file into Emelia

How Emelia stores your contacts

In Emelia, contacts live in lists, grouped under the Lead Lists menu. A campaign does not hold a file: it points to one or more lists and works out its recipients from them, minus the lists you exclude.

In practice, you import once, into a list, and reuse that list wherever you want. The list is also where you add contacts later, run the email finder, and see each contact's status.

Prepare the file

Most failed imports are fixed before you even open Emelia. Go through the file with this checklist.

• One header row, at the very top. No title, logo or empty row above the column names.
• Every column name different, case included: Email and email count as a duplicate. This is the number one cause of failed imports: an empty email column, values landing in the wrong fields, and no error message.
• One email column only, and one address per cell.
• First name and last name in two separate columns. Personalization, the email finder and LinkedIn automation all rely on these two fields.
• The company website or domain if you want Emelia to find the addresses: it is the piece of data that moves the result the most.
• All your personalization variables (opening line, city, industry, pre-written message). A list can be completed later, but it is simpler to have everything from the start.
• UTF-8 encoding, otherwise accented characters turn into gibberish in your emails.
• No useless columns: empty columns, internal IDs, email_emelia and domain_emelia columns left by an older email search, and above all the Status column of an export (more on that below).

Step 1: create a new list

In the left menu, open Lead Lists (Listes de leads on the screenshot), then click New List at the top right.

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• 1In the left menu, open Lead Lists.
• 2At the top right, click New List.

Step 2: drop the file

Drag your file into the drop zone, or click it to pick the file on your computer. Give the list a name, then click Upload.

Pick a name you will recognize in three months, when you look for it in a campaign's settings: the target, the source and the date are enough (“HR directors Lyon, October 2026”).

Step 3: map the columns

The Column Mapping window opens. On the left, the name of each column in your file. In the middle, the target field: what that column will become in Emelia, and the only place you need to act. On the right, a preview of the first values, which saves you from picking the wrong column when two names look alike.

Emelia has already done part of the work. It recognizes columns by their name (“First Name”, “Prénom”, “Email”, “Company”, “Website”, “LinkedIn”…), by their content (a column full of email addresses or URLs), or because they carry the name of a custom variable you already created in your account. Everything else lands on Skip, and a skipped column is not imported.

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• 1Left: the column name in your file.
• 2Middle: the target field. Click it to change it.
• 3Right: the first values, so you can check.
• 4When everything looks right, click Save Mapping.

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• 1Skip: the column is not imported.
• 2Standard fields, by technical name: firstName for the first name.

The names worth knowing: firstName, lastName, email, linkedinUrlProfile (LinkedIn profile URL) and jobTitle on the lead side; companyName, websiteUrl and companyDomain on the company side.

The fields that really matter

Create a custom variable

Some columns match no standard field yet are worth importing: an AI-generated opening line, a pre-written message, information specific to your trade. Open the field list and pick Add Custom Variable, at the very bottom. The Add Custom Variable window opens.

• Technical Name: letters, digits and underscores, no spaces or hyphens, and unique in your account (for example opener or message_step1).
• Display Name: free text, with spaces and capitals (“Message, step 1”). Without it, Emelia shows the technical name.
• A variable created once stays available in all your lists. On your next import, a column carrying exactly its technical or display name is mapped to it automatically.

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• 1The Technical Name: the one you will write between braces in your messages.
• 2The Display Name, optional, only helps you find your way.
• 3The Schema: Lead for information about the person, Company for information about the company.

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• 1Emelia checks the name is free and shows Available.
• 2Pick Lead or Company.
• 3Click Save: the column is mapped to the new variable.

Step 4: save and let the import finish

Click Save Mapping. Progress shows at the bottom left of the window, row by row. Once it is done, the list appears in Lead Lists with its number of leads, email addresses and LinkedIn URLs: a useful first check. If you expected 1,200 emails and see 40, a column was mapped wrong.

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• 1Import progress, row by row.
• 2A column recognized on its own: zip becomes postalCode.

Step 5: plug the list into a campaign

In your campaign, the Campaign Settings panel has a Lead list block: select your list there. The block right below, Lead exclusion, removes contacts found in other lists (customers, people already contacted): everything is explained in blacklist and exclusions.

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• 1Pick the list to contact in Lead list.
• 2Optional: the lists to leave out in Lead exclusion.

Duplicates and rows without an email

The list keeps everything. An address that appears twice in the file gives two records, and a row without an email is imported as soon as it holds at least one piece of data.

The campaign deduplicates. The same contact appearing twice, or in two lists attached to the same campaign, gets the sequence only once. The comparison uses the email address, or the LinkedIn URL when there is no address. Two different addresses for the same person, however, count as two contacts.

Rows without an email are still useful for a LinkedIn campaign or for an email search. But in a campaign that starts with an email, a contact without an address never gets past that first step: Emelia drops them, and they won't receive the LinkedIn steps that follow either. For them, run a campaign that starts with LinkedIn, or put a condition on the email variable at the top of the sequence.

Adding contacts or columns to an existing list

Open the list and click Import at the top right. This button exists on lists created from a file or created empty, not on a list synced with HubSpot or Pipedrive, nor on a LinkedIn extraction.

After the usual mapping, Emelia asks which field identifies duplicates between the new file and the list: most often the email address, detected automatically. Matching rows are not created again: their new columns are added, and for columns present on both sides you choose Keep existing or Use new values. The other rows become new contacts. Finally, click Start Import.

If the list is already used by a running campaign, the new contacts join it at the first step, at the campaign's new-contacts-per-day pace.

Re-importing an export: the status trap

A list export (⋮ menu > Export list) contains a Status column: each contact's status, such as “Email sent”, “Email opened”, “Email reply” or “Bounced”. If you re-import that file, Emelia automatically maps this column to the contact's status. The re-imported records therefore show a status… but they are new records.

A campaign remembers what it already sent record by record, not address by address. If you delete the old list and attach the new one to the same campaign, it picks all those contacts up again at the first email. Those who already got it receive it a second time, and an “Email reply” status inherited from the file does not protect them. Only the “Bounced” and “Unsubscribed” statuses, and the blacklist, block sending.

Your contacts live in a CRM?

If your file is just a HubSpot or Pipedrive export, connect the CRM instead: the list updates itself every night, and campaign activity can flow back to the contact record. Mapping works exactly as it does for a file.