In this tutorial Aaron LeBauer walks viewers through the complete process of importing existing contacts into a new ActiveCampaign account while maintaining compliance and preserving automation logic. He begins by emphasizing the importance of respecting permission—contacts without prior consent can be imported but must be marked appropriately to avoid unsolicited emails. Aaron then details how to export contacts from other systems (e.g., Mailchimp, QuickBooks) into CSV files, stressing the need to separate customers (existing patients) from prospects because ActiveCampaign imports each file into a single list. He explains the required columns (first name, last name, email, phone, address) and how to map them during the import, including ignoring unnecessary fields like IP address. The video demonstrates creating and applying tags (e.g., "existing patients") during import to identify groups and to control which automations fire. Aaron shows how to temporarily deactivate automations that are triggered by tags to prevent unwanted email sequences from running on historic contacts, then reactivate them after the import. He also covers bulk‑edit tools for adding tags or starting contacts in automations, and advises on best practices for post‑import communication: sending value‑based campaigns, handling unsubscribes, and allowing contacts to opt into new sequences via forms. Finally, he recommends not duplicating existing email sequences from other platforms; instead, let those finish in the original system and route new contacts into fresh ActiveCampaign automations. The tutorial concludes with encouragement to consult ActiveCampaign’s help resources for deeper customization.
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Hey, what's up? It's Aaron and in this video I'm going to show you how to import your contacts to your new ActiveCampaign account. These are your existing contacts who maybe you have from another email system like Mailchimp or you have them in QuickBooks or intake queue, etc. A couple things I want to make sure you understand is that if you have a contact and they've not given you permission to send them emails, you can still import them. We just have to make sure that they're marked correctly so that when you send them a welcome message we can then move them into one of your automations. But we're not going to keep sending them emails if they've never given you permission to send them emails. If they're a patient and you've sent them emails before because they're a patient, you can import them as a patient to your list and say, hey, you're a patient. My list. Here's welcome to our brand new email newsletter, et cetera. But I don't want you just grabbing a bunch of emails off the Internet or buying an email list or even just importing a list that you got from somewhere or you know, and people aren't suspecting you because they'll start saying this is spam because you've never sent them an email before. And if you have an email list from somewhere else or contacts and customers, you can import them. We just have to just manage them properly. So I'm not going to go through every way to get your email list from your current software because like, there's no possible way for me to know exactly where it is. But what you need to do is you need to export your contacts. And so the information we need is their name, preferably first name, last name, phone number, email address. Those are the main things we need. Or actually we need name, first name and email address. That's all we need. If you can get a couple other bits of information that would be great. So you need to get it into a CSV file. So let's say, I mean you'll have hopefully more than four people, but there's a couple things that we need to do. We need to create a file of patients or customers. So one file is going to be a list of customers and the other file is going to be a list of prospects or not customers. So if it all comes in one, then you're just going to need to organize. Let's say you need to go in and you just look at everyone, go customer, customer, I can hold down shift and I'll select all. If I can hold down my command, it'll select just two of them like this. And if those aren't customers, I can delete it. And then I would save as testimport contact file customer. Right. And so I have to have one that's customers and one file that's prospects because we have to upload them differently because we have in here we have lists and when I import people. So this is my wife's account. This isn't the account that I've set up for you. Let me show you. I'm going to import into my wife's account so I don't mess up my template accounts. But in the account I've set up for you, there's going to be like, like clients, leads and blog subscribers. So if I import a list, everyone I import has to go into one list at a time. So if I bring in 100 contacts, I can't as I import them, can't separate them into clients or leads. I have to really just put them into one or the other. I can put them into leads and blog or clients and blog, but I can't put half of them into leads and half of them into clients. So to start, the Excel or CSV files have to be separated into clients or customers and prospects. And once I have it, I believe it has to be a CSV file. So we can also do save as and I can, if it's an Excel file, I can just kind of come down and do comma separated values and I can save it as a CSV file. So you may need to spend. It might take you 10 minutes to go through your whole export from QuickBooks, let's say, or from your current system and separate them out. Or your current system might be able to separate them out for you. So if you're using QuickBooks, everyone in there is going to be a customer. If you're using mailchimp, you should be able to export a list of just your prospects and a list of customers. So here, like with Andra's, you know, we've got these. I can do, let's see, delete the Engagement view context. I could go to view Contacts and then I can do export contacts and then you export your contacts and then let's say I want to import contacts. I can totally import Contacts here in ActiveCampaign from the list and import from file if I want to import when I'm ready to import. Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to go to contacts and then I can do import contacts import from file and I can go find my file open. Alright, so let me go back to my file and just show you. What you want to do is you want to have a column that's. Let me see if I can make this bigger. You want to have one column that's first name, one column that's last name. If you can't split them up, that's okay. Activecampaign can import full name, phone number, address. You might have other things like IP address and all this other junk like ignore those. The main ones we want are first name, last name, email, phone and address. If it's exported and it already has those, great. Don't worry about. Just know what they're called because when we go to import, we need to map them over. You see how it says first name, first name, last name, email address, phone. It says do not import this field. Well, I can go down here to phone address and I can go down here not IP address like printed address. And I don't have a field. So I could add a new field if I want their mailing address in my account. But let's say IP address like you don't need to import that, that's unnecessary. And then I would select the list I want and then any tags. So what I suggest you do when you import these, put like just create a tag that's existing patients and I'm gonna put test in there because I'll know to remove the tag later on. But existing patients and then tab. Now when I import it, it's gonna create this tag as like existing patients or existing customers. Right here we want to import them as active contact and click update existing. Because what that'll do is if they're already in your system, it'll update them with this tag and into that list. You can also say if these were patients, you would put existing patients and then you would put patients. So now they're going to get tagged as patients and they get tagged as existing. Test. Now when you do this, if you have an automation that's triggered with this tag, this is where it gets tricky. It'll run that automation. So what you want to do is. So if I want to do that and I want to import people without triggering the automation because maybe these patients came five years ago. New patient scheduled inpatient after first visit. Okay, I don't know that this will be that, but let's say. So this is triggered with the, with the form and not the Tag so it won't trigger this automation. So good, I don't have to do it. Let's just say this was triggered by the tag patients. You could go and toggle this automation to inactive. Now I could go import everyone, they won't get triggered into this automation. Once they're done importing I would come back and turn this automation back on to active. Hopefully that makes sense. This can get a little complicated, but if you mess up, no worries, people won't care. And if you can do neuroanatomy or you've gotten this far, like just remember it's just go slow, map it out. But if when you import them, adding a tag like ebook back pain ebook is going to trigger an automation and you don't want them, you know, they got it like months ago. Like I believe this one's triggered by the tag ebook. If I was going to add that, I would come in and make this inactive and then go back and finish importing and click on import now. And then once they're done importing then you come back and you make the automation active again. And as they come in it won't start that automation for them. And then what you're going to do is you're going to go back and you're going to, so you're going to import your clients list and then you come back and do it again and import your prospects list. Invariably sometimes you'll mess things up and that's okay, just do not worry about it at all. Just you know, measure twice, cut once. Then what you're going to do is you'll see when you go to contacts you'll have a whole bunch of people like in your contacts, like they're not in here because this is the sandbox account. If you want to start a contact in automation manually, there's a couple ways you can do that. You go to the contact and you can edit bulk edit contacts. And when you go to bulk edit contacts there's an option to enter an automation or add a tag and if you know that the tag triggers an automation, you can add the tag to the contacts or you can trigger an automation to the contacts or both. You can take people out of an automation by doing bulk edit. You just need to make sure you go to, let's say list and edit all and then you can trigger people to start an automation. Going back to what I said before, you don't want to trigger an automation to someone who was a patient a year ago and it says welcome to our clinic. You're a brand new patient. So here's what I suggest you do. I suggest you import your existing contacts and you tag them, you know, as patient to the patient list with a existing patient tag. So now I know, okay, the existing patients have a separate tag so I can email all of them specifically if I want to get specific and then I can send a campaign email to them and say hey Mrs. Jones, this is Dr. Labouwer, I want to welcome you to our brand new like newsletter. It's not really a newsletter but a brand new newsletter and I'll be updating you on important things happening in our clinic. By the way, I wrote a brand new ebook, would love to send you a copy. Just click the link below if you'd like to get it and then you just put a link to your ebook opt in form remember? Oops, it's under Sites forms. You put a link to that form in there and anyone who gets it, who wants it, will click on that and now they'll enter that automation on their own volition and that's the best way to get people in there. You might even say, hey, you know, I've got room for a few total body diagnostic exams this week. If you've been struggling with X, Y and Z, here's a link where you can request availability and you send them a link to the ask about availability form. So assuming you have these set up correctly, you can now send campaign emails out to an existing list of people and they will then manually move them into your automations especially if they've you know, opted into one of those a long time ago or didn't versus putting them through something that they didn't want. And I want to make that clear like we don't want to put them into something they don't want and people will start going back through these on their own volition. And when you start sending emails to a list that maybe haven't emailed, just know that a lot of people are going to unsubscribe and that's okay, we don't want them in there anymore. If, if a message like that isn't something that you're like I don't want to hear from this person anymore. Just do not worry about the unsubscribes that you get. And what you can do is you just send them value based emails and give them links to go do other things, watch videos, hey, get this free book or request an appointment, et cetera and then that'll get them moving through your automations when they want it to happen with their permission. Hopefully that makes sense. The other thing that you can do, you can start people in an automation who are currently in it. But my number one suggestion would be is that let's say you're using mailchimp and someone is in your free ebook sequence over on mailchimp. Bring them into the active campaign, but don't put them through the same email sequence. Just let that email sequence end over at mailchimp and then new people will go into it over an ActiveCampaign or patients specifically. If you have a list of five emails, you send all patients over in Mailchimp and now you have 10 here in ActiveCampaign. Let them finish that out. It's kind of like when you raise your rates, you let the existing people complete their plan of care and you roll new people into a new plan of care at a higher rate. It's the same thing we're going to do if you're already using email automation somewhere else. So that's how you import your contacts, your existing contacts into ActiveCampaign. If you have questions, you know you can come and ask them in the group. There are other videos here to help you go deeper into setting up and customizing your ActiveCampaign account. Don't hesitate to go to ActiveCampaign.com and search their help documentation. It got a lot of great videos and help documentation on how to maximize your activecampaign account using our preloaded emails and our preloaded automations. Thanks so much and we'll see you on the next video. SA.
