Easily Bulk-Import Contacts to Apollo via CSV 

When importing contacts to Apollo, the only columns you absolutely need to have in your CSV are First Name, Last Name, and Company (although you should also include the Contact Email or Contact LinkedIn URL if you already have them). With this, Apollo will enrich the rest of the information about the lead and their account.

1. Navigate to the People page, in the left main menu.
2. At the right upper corner, click on the +Add button in the upper-right corner of the page.
3. Select Bulk Import from CSV from the dropdown.
4. Click the Select CSV File button.
5. Select your CSV file from your computer to upload in the popup.
6. Use the drop-down menus to map each of your CSV columns to the corresponding Apollo fields.
7. For What stage would you like to set the contacts to?, assign your contacts to the Contact Stage that best represents their current level of engagement. This is very important for being able to efficiently message your contacts once they're in Apollo and being added to Sequences.
8. If contacts already exist in Apollo, choose whether or not to update existing records with information from the CSV.
   • If you opt to update existing records in Apollo from your CSV, we'll only update records that have a matching email OR a matching name (first and last) and company. You can also opt to skip it and not update the record.
   • Notes: 
     • When updating a record via a CSV, we use 3 sets of unique identifiers, in order of most to least unique - linkedin_URL, first_name + last_name + organization, and email_address. This means, if you include linkedin_URL you can update all the other data; if you include first_name + last_name + organization but not a different linkedin_URL you can update email address and other data; if you include only email_address but not the linkedin_URL, first_name + last_name + organization then you can only update other fields.
     • If you include duplicate contacts in your CSV, the top row of the duplicates will be used to update the record.
9. If the owner value is missing in your CSV, assign owner to, allows assigning the contacts to whichever of your Apollo Users (teammates) you want to own them.
   • If you have Salesforce/Hubspot integrated with Apollo, be sure to select "Yes" in the Create people in Salesforce/Hubspot, if they do not exist to sync any new contacts from your CSV with Salesforce/Hubspot.
10.  If existing contacts already have owner, choose whether or not to update existing ownership of existing contacts.
    • If a contact is already in your database and has an owner, you have the option of updating that ownership to the teammate you assigned them or to leave them as is.
11. Add to a List? Use this option to include all newly imported contacts on a list directly if needed.
12. Once you're done, click on Import.

Important Note: Depending on your import's size and the state of our app, it may take a couple of hours to finish uploading, though most imports should take only a couple of minutes. That said, uploading a CSV that is more than 10k rows is not advised. If you need to import more than that, then splitting the import up into smaller chunks is your best bet.

You can verify the status of your import by going to Settings > Imports & Exports > Contact Import.

Tips for Importing

• If you are uploading a column that will be mapped to a multi-picklist field you'll need to have the values you want to have stored for each user added to the CSV cell separated by semicolons. For example, if you have a multi-picklist (in my example the name is "multi picklist") and you want to have a contact have "Option 1" and "Option 2", here's what it would look like:

• If you want to upload values for a checkbox, enter True for checked and False for unchecked.

Searching for Imported Contacts

​​Over the People page, at the Filters section, click on More Filters at the bottom of the filters list, and find Contact CSV Import. There, you'll find a list of all CSV contact imports you've ever done, and you can filter down to only contacts imported from a specific file(s).  

​Choosing a CSV file from the list in that filter will return the contacts you uploaded in that CSV:

Related Resources

• Upload a CSV of Accounts to Apollo