Here are some best practices for file formatting when uploading files via InstantData, FTP or our List API.
There are a few best practices for file formatting:
- Include column headers (see list below), so InstantData correctly recognizes your data
- Use ASCII, UTF-8 or ISO-8559-1 character encoding
- Eliminate blank rows and columns
- Ensure that every email address is in its own cell
- List all email addresses in the same column. InstantData only processes one email address column per file
- Postal addresses should be split into separate fields: address1, address2, city, state and zip
- Eliminate duplicate records to avoid extra costs
- Ensure that all of your data is on one sheet
- Save your file as comma delimited, with a .csv extension, or tab delimited, with a .txt extension
- Optionally compress the file using zip
InstantData recognizes the following column headers:
- First name, first, fname
- Last name, last, lname, surname
- Full name - for combined first and last
- Street, address, address 1
- Street 2, address 2
- City, town
- State, region, province
- Zip, postal code, plus4
- Country
- Email, e-mail
- MD5 - hash of a lower case email address
- SHA1 - hash of a lower case email address