Most failed imports are not Quanda's fault. They fail because of the source file. Scrambled columns, dates in the wrong format, broken special characters. When you prepare your data properly, the import itself takes just a few minutes and you will not have to track down and fix anything by hand afterwards. In this lesson we will walk through how to get contacts out of your system and into a file Quanda can work with.

Where to get the data

Whether you keep your contacts in a CRM, Outlook, an accounting program, or an e-commerce platform, practically every such tool can export to a file with the xlsx or csv extension. Quanda accepts both formats.

An xlsx file opens in Excel directly. With csv it is not that simple. If you just double-click it, the content often piles up into a single column and becomes unreadable. Excel has its own procedure for this. Open a blank sheet, choose "Data" in the top menu, find the "Get & Transform Data" section, and click "From Text/CSV". Select the downloaded file, confirm it is a delimited file, choose UTF-8 as the encoding and comma as the delimiter. You should now see the data neatly arranged in columns.

One value, one column

The basic rule of preparation is: every value gets its own column. First name separately, last name separately, email separately. A merged cell like "John Smith, Boston" will ruin your import, because it cannot be matched to any field in Quanda.

We recommend preparing at least these columns:

• First name.
• Last name.
• Email.
• Phone.
• Contact tags.

The tags column holds the groups you want to assign the contact to. If a contact belongs to several groups, write the tags into one cell and separate them with commas. Quanda will create them during the import and assign them to the contacts. Keep in mind that tags are sensitive to spaces, capitalization, and accented characters. "Newsletter" and "newsletter" are two different tags.

Formats that matter

Some fields have a fixed format and if you do not follow it, the row ends up among the errors:

• Gender. Quanda recognizes the forms male/female or man/woman. You will need the gender for Quanda's automatic personalized salutation using the last name.
• Date. The supported formats are 01.01.2019 or 1.1.2019. If Excel shows you something else, select the whole column and change the cell format to date.
• Contact owner. This field takes the email address of a Quanda user, not their name.

You can also prepare GDPR-related legal data in the file: the legal basis for processing personal data, the purpose of processing and its validity, and the permission to send emails. This saves you from filling it in manually for hundreds of contacts later.

Saving the file and encoding

Save the finished file as xlsx or csv. If you choose csv, pick the variant in Excel whose name or description mentions delimited text values. Quanda does not support the "MS-DOS" or "Macintosh" csv formats.

If special characters come out scrambled in the data, the culprit is usually the encoding. First check the source file to see whether the text is fine there. If it is, save the file as csv with UTF-8 encoding. If your program does not offer that, open the csv in Notepad, choose "Save As", select UTF-8 as the encoding, and save. Then run the import from this corrected version.

You can always use imports later to add, correct, and extend contact data, so the first file does not have to be perfect. Still, the more work you do in Excel, the less will be left to do in Quanda.

Your file is ready and you are about to import. The import wizard in Quanda has only a few steps, but two decisions in it have a big impact. How Quanda should treat contacts it already knows, and whether you let it create salutations automatically. In this lesson we will go through the whole wizard, from selecting the file to reviewing the results.

Where to find the import

You will find bulk contact import in the top menu under "Contacts / Bulk contact import". On the first page you select the saved file with the xlsx or csv extension and set the import priority for contacts and companies. Then you continue with the "Start contact import" button.

Import priority

Quanda does not allow the same email address to be saved twice. The import priority therefore determines what happens when an imported address already exists in the database.

• Existing contacts take priority. Quanda simply skips such a contact. Nothing is modified or updated. This is useful when you are uploading a new list and do not want to touch what you already have carefully filled in.
• Imported contacts take priority. Quanda updates all the data you map in the next step for the contact it found. Some information may be added, corrected, or removed this way. Use this option when you are correcting or enriching your existing database with the file.

In both cases, an address Quanda does not know yet is created as a new contact. The priority setting for importing companies works the same way.

Mapping columns and the import process

On the next page you connect the values from your file to the fields in Quanda. For each field you open a dropdown with the column names from your file and pick the one that logically belongs to that field. First name to first name, last name to last name, gender to gender. Do not forget the tags field, without tags it will be much harder to select contacts for your campaigns. Once everything is mapped, scroll all the way down and click "Finish contact import".

You can follow the progress on the page using the indicator. The import runs in the background, though, so with larger files you do not have to wait. A message with the results arrives by email once it finishes, and you will also find it at the very bottom of the bulk import page.

Import results and errors

The import results tell you how many contacts and companies were imported, how many were skipped because of duplicate emails, how many were updated, and how many faulty records Quanda found.

If some contacts could not be imported, you will find a table listing the errors below the results. For each error you can see the row number in the source file, which column the value came from, which field in Quanda it was headed for, and which value caused the problem. Fix a handful of errors manually. If there are more, it is better to fix the source file and repeat the import. And if the file comes from a CRM or accounting program, fix the data there as well, so the same error does not come back with the next export.

Personalized salutations

Quanda can store up to four kinds of salutation for each contact. A complete salutation with a prefix and the last name, a complete salutation with a prefix and the first name, the standalone last name form, and the standalone first name form. You either import them or let contact automations create them for you.

Before you turn the automations on, set up the prefixes on the Settings / Salutation management page. For last names, "Dear Mr.", "Dear Ms.", and the universal "Hello" work well. For first names, choose prefixes that match the tone you use with your audience, whether formal or friendly.

For Quanda to create a salutation based on the last name, it needs to know the contact's gender. You either import it or an automation derives it from the first name. Set the automations themselves to both events, that is, to creating a new contact and to editing an existing one. Otherwise salutations will only be filled in for part of your database. Salutations that could not be created are listed in the lower part of the Salutation management page, where you can fill them in and save them right away.

Your contact list does not contain only addresses you can write to. Part of the database is made up of people who unsubscribed and addresses where the email could not be delivered. These two statuses are easy to confuse, yet they arise in completely different ways and are handled differently. In this lesson we will clarify the difference and what to do with such contacts.

Unsubscribed contacts

The law requires every commercial email to contain an unsubscribe link. When a recipient clicks it, Quanda automatically sets their email sending status in the GDPR section to "Cannot send (unsubscribed)". You will find this detail in the contact profile, in the section with the legal aspects of personal data processing.

Unsubscribed contacts then never appear among campaign recipients, so you will not send them any more emails. It does not matter which tags they have assigned. You can filter them in the contact list using the dropdown filter above the list.

A practical tip. When someone replies to a bulk email saying they do not want any more messages, click the unsubscribe link in that email yourself. It saves you looking up the contact and changing the setting manually.

Blacklisted contacts

A contact ends up on the blacklist when the last delivery attempt failed. The exclusion from mailings can be temporary or permanent:

• A hard bounce means a permanent rejection, typically a non-existent address or a full mailbox. Such a contact stays on the list permanently.
• A soft bounce means a temporary rejection, for example because of an outage. Quanda returns these contacts to the recipient pool after certain intervals and tries the delivery again.

How do you get to the specific reasons? In the contact list, use the filter above the contacts to show the blacklisted ones and export them. In the downloaded file you will find the columns Hard Bounce Reason and Soft Bounce Reason. If a contact is on the list and both columns are empty, your email was marked as spam, either by the recipient's mail client or by the recipient directly.

Then work with the export practically. Fix typos in addresses, try to find new addresses for the non-existent ones, and remove the permanently blacklisted leftovers. It also helps to check the DNS records of your sending domain and your link branding. They increase the credibility of your emails and improve delivery to primary inboxes.

What you can delete and what you cannot

Quanda deliberately limits bulk deletion of contacts. All customers share one sending environment and its reputation affects deliverability for every one of them. If anything could be deleted at any time without restrictions, low-quality databases would easily make their way into the system and even those who manage their contacts honestly would pay the price.

You can therefore delete blacklisted contacts and contacts Quanda has no recorded relationship with, meaning you have never sent them anything and they have not come through a form or questionnaire. You cannot delete unsubscribed contacts or contacts with any recorded relationship.

Why you should not delete unsubscribed contacts

Leave unsubscribed contacts in the database, even if deleting them were possible. By deleting them you would lose the history of sent emails and, most importantly, the very information that they unsubscribed. It would then only take one import of an older file and you would start writing to someone who explicitly asked you not to.

On top of that, unsubscribed contacts cost you nothing in terms of account capacity. They do not count toward the total number of contacts in your plan, so it does not matter whether you have ten of them or a hundred.

In Quanda, a tag is the basic tool for turning one big database into a set of groups you can write to personally. It looks like a small thing, but the way you set up your tags will shape your work for years to come. In this lesson we will look at how tags get attached to contacts, how to manage them, and how to build segments that make sense.

What a tag does

By assigning a tag you place a contact into a specific group. You will use it most often when selecting campaign recipients, where instead of going through the whole database you check one or more tags. A contact can have multiple tags, so groups overlap freely. One person can be "customer", "source-tradeshow", and "interest-newsletter" at the same time.

Before you start tagging, think about which groups you really need for your future communication. Splitting contacts into existing and potential customers works well, because each of these groups will receive different information. Beyond that you can sort by product category, by where and how they buy, by how they use your product, and by their relationship to your company.

How tags get attached to contacts

You have three routes and in practice you will use all of them:

• By import. Have a tags column in your source file. Write multiple tags for one contact into a single cell and separate them with commas. Quanda creates and assigns them during the import. Tags transfer the same way through a CRM integration, if you keep them there.
• By automation. A tag can be added by a condition in an email campaign, for example to everyone who clicked a specific link. The second option is contact automations.
• Manually. In the contact profile you pick a tag from the ones you have created. In the contact list you can check multiple contacts at once and add a tag to them in bulk.

Watch your spelling. When creating tags, spaces, capitalization, and accented characters all matter, so a typo creates a new tag and your contacts split into two piles.

Managing and naming tags

You manage tags in the Contacts section, in the area for adding and editing contact tags. Next to each tag, the number of contacts it is assigned to is shown in parentheses. You can create and delete tags here, with one exception. A tag that is added to contacts by an automation from an email campaign cannot be deleted, because other things may depend on it.

One account can hold at most five hundred tags. That sounds like a lot, but without a system the space fills up surprisingly fast. Come up with a prefix based on type, for example "source-web", "interest-productA", or "status-customer", and stick to it. The list will stay readable even a year later and a new colleague will find what they need.

A segment needs a plan

The mere existence of a tag brings you nothing. For each group, prepare a plan of what you will send them and when, so that the contacts in that group regularly receive information that makes sense for them. This targeting affects campaign results more than most tweaks to an email template.

At the same time, do not overdo the number of groups. Every additional group means another version of the content, and it is better to have three segments you serve regularly than fifteen you never find time for. Your team's capacity matters just as much in segmentation as the data stored on your contacts.

Every once in a while, go through your tags and tidy up. Groups you have not addressed in a year should either be worked into the plan or removed. A database you know your way around can be used quickly. In an overgrown one, every recipient selection turns into a search party.

Delivering an email is not enough these days. What matters is where it lands. In the primary inbox the recipient will find it, in the spam folder nobody will ever look at it. Mail servers decide this based on the sender's reputation, and that reputation is shaped most by who you send to. Contact scoring by open rate shows you who actually reads your emails and helps you adjust your mailings accordingly.

Why open rates matter

When you repeatedly send to people who do not open, click, or reply to your messages, you are signaling to mail servers that nobody cares about your content. The fewer emails go out to addresses that do not work or that nobody reads, the better your reputation. And the better your reputation, the larger the share of your messages ends up where it should.

Seven segments by open rate

Quanda places contacts into segments based on their average open rate:

• Fans: 80% to 100%.
• Active: 50% to 79.9%.
• Inactive: 20% to 49.9%.
• Dormant: 5% to 19.9%.
• Zombies: 0.1% to 4.9%.
• Ghosts: 0%.
• Undetermined: contacts you have not yet sent at least six campaigns to.

The "Undetermined" segment is not bad news. It just means Quanda does not have enough data yet to classify the contact. For freshly collected contacts this is the normal state.

What to do with each segment

Scoring is not a deletion list, it is the basis for decisions about frequency and content:

• Fans and Active. Here you can afford to send regularly and make offers. These people care about you, so do not hold back.
• Inactive and Dormant. Lower the frequency and try changing the content or the subject line. Often the issue is simply that you write to them too often or about things that miss them.
• Zombies and Ghosts. Remove these contacts from your regular campaigns. You can send them one reactivation message with a clear question about whether they still want your emails. If they do not respond, stop writing to them. For some of them, removing them entirely will also help your reputation.

Removing a contact from a campaign does not mean deleting them from the database. In most cases it is enough to significantly limit communication with them.

Habits that protect your reputation

Scoring is just one piece of the puzzle. Alongside it, stick to a few rules that protect your reputation over the long term:

• Send regularly and without big swings in volume over the week and the month.
• Send only to people who want to receive your emails.
• Do not hide the unsubscribe link. An unsubscribe is still better for you than being marked as spam.
• Make sure recipients have no reason to mark your message as junk. The three most common causes are sending too many emails, sending content without value, and writing to people who are not interested in you.
• Prioritize recipients who frequently open and click your emails.

Treat scoring as a quick quarterly health report on your database. If your segments keep shifting toward Dormant and Zombies, the problem is usually not the database. It is what you send and how often.

First name, last name, email, and phone come ready-made in every tool. Things get interesting with the data specific to your business. A loyalty card number, a car brand, an industry, or a company size. That is exactly what Quanda's custom fields are for. In this lesson we will show what they are good for and how to fill them with data.

Six extra fields

You have six custom fields available for contacts and three for companies. They are used to store information the system has no ready-made field for. You name them in Settings / Custom fields, and the chosen name then appears everywhere you work with the field.

Think it through before you name a field. Renaming an established field leads to confusion, because the old data stays in it. It pays off to pick data you actually have about your customers and that will influence what you write to them.

What you will use them for

Custom fields serve three purposes:

• Sorting recipients. You select who a campaign goes to based on the value in a field.
• Filtering online survey results. You split the answers by who they came from.
• Personalization. In the email editor you insert the field's merge tag into the text, and on sending it is replaced by the value stored for each contact.

Data gets into the fields in three ways. Manually in the contact profile, in bulk through an import, or automatically through active forms. The last option takes the least work, because people fill in the data themselves and in its current form.

Contact owner

The contact owner is usually the salesperson who takes care of that contact. To assign one, they must first exist as a Quanda user in Settings / Users. They are then linked to the contact through their email, so in the import file all you need is a "Contact owner" column with the user's email address.

Why bother with this? Quanda offers automatic sender selection, which sets each contact's owner as the sender for that contact. One campaign can therefore have several different senders, and the customer receives the email from the salesperson they know. If you keep your contacts in Raynet CRM, the owner transfers to Quanda automatically during the export. The condition is that a Quanda user with the same email exists.

Data that brings automatic campaigns to life

The last category of custom data covers values that trigger automatic campaigns. A typical example is the name day date. Name days are a tradition in Central Europe where each first name has its own day in the calendar, and Quanda can send automatic name day greetings. For that to work, the name day date must be filled in for every contact.

The procedure is straightforward. Download a table of first names with their name day dates, export your contacts from Quanda, join the two lists in Excel with the VLOOKUP function using the first name, and import the result back with priority given to imported contacts. When mapping the fields, selecting the email and the name day date is enough.

Watch out for two things along the way. The date must be in the format 01.01.2019 or 1.1.2019, and remove the values in the column where no matching name was found. Otherwise the import would fail on those rows. The automatic campaign handles the rest for you.