Ovation allows you to leverage the data that you have already been collecting and upload it into our system so you can send them messages, survey them, and enrich that data with more customer information.
Format your data
Your data must be uploaded as a CSV file with three columns representing Name, Phone, and Email. If you do not have names or email addresses, you must still fill at least one row of the CSV file for those columns. One easy way to do this is to include a header row as below.
Configure upload settings
Log into your account and navigate to Take Action > Customers. In the upper right, select "+ Add" and choose "Bulk Import".
First, choose an invitation that you would like to send to your customer list. Normally, you will want to select "Do nothing" so that it just uploads this list. However, if you would like to send a survey to each customer at the same time, you can select "Invite them to leave a survey".
NOTE: Do not send a list of more than 200 people a survey or the system will timeout. Also, we HIGHLY suggest not sending a survey to customers that haven't been to your business within the last month.
Next, choose the location that these customers will be added to. If multiple locations are represented by your list, create a separate CSV file for each location that only includes customers from that location.
Select the marketing eligibility of these customers. If you have received express consent to send these customers marketing text messages, select "Eligible to receive marketing". Otherwise, select "Not eligible". By setting their marketing eligibility, you are taking full liability for sending messages to these customers.
To finish the setup, upload your list by pressing "Choose file" and selecting the list that you would like to upload from your computer.
Mapping import fields
Once your file is selected, you will need to map each column of your file to Name, Phone, and Email. Once correctly mapped, select "Import X Customers".
The customers will begin to import. Once finished, there may be a number of different errors to show letting you know that some of the customers have not been uploaded. This can be due to a customer already existing in your Ovation database or an invalid phone number.
Troubleshooting
You may get stuck or an import might fail because of the following reasons:
You are trying to upload an extremely large list of customers in a single file. Break the list up into smaller lists to import correctly.
Your file does not include 3 columns. Phone, Name, and Email must all be mapped even if you do not have names or emails. Create a row in your file with headers so that you have a column for each of these.
You are trying to send a survey to a list of more than 200 customers. This will cause the system to overload, so only send surveys to groups of less than 200 customers.
You have no phone numbers or invalid phone numbers. A customer can only be uploaded with a valid phone number. Customers with email addresses only cannot be uploaded.