Format a CSV Contacts List

Contact data is the foundation of CRM systems, email marketing platforms, sales tools, and address books, and CSV is the universally accepted format for importing and exporting contacts between all of them. Whether you're migrating from one CRM to another, importing a list of event attendees, or exporting contacts for an email campaign, understanding the structure and common issues of contact CSVs saves significant data cleaning effort. This example shows eight columns covering the fields that virtually every CRM system expects: first and last name separately (not combined as "full name," which splits differently in different cultures), email as the primary contact identifier, phone in international format, company, job title, city, and country code. Separating first and last name is important because different CRMs, email services, and mail merge systems handle name splitting differently — "Johnson, Alice" would be split incorrectly by many parsers expecting "Alice Johnson." The Dave Brown row intentionally has an empty phone field. In CSV, an empty field between two commas ([email protected],,StartupXYZ) is a perfectly valid representation of a null value. Most import tools handle this correctly and leave the phone field empty rather than importing "null" as text. However, some CRMs treat consecutive commas as a parsing error — the CSV viewer shows this row correctly and confirms the column count matches the header row. Duplicate detection strategy: before importing a contacts CSV, always check for duplicate emails. The same person may appear multiple times due to different name spellings, old and new employers, or multiple form submissions. Using email as the deduplication key and keeping the most recently modified record is a common strategy. Some CRMs offer merge-on-import functionality that combines duplicate records. Phone number formatting: the example uses E.164 format (+1-555-0101) for US numbers and international format for others. This is the recommended storage format because it's unambiguous and SMS delivery services expect E.164. CRMs often display phone numbers formatted for the user's locale, but store them in E.164 internally. Country codes: using two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes (US, DE, GB) rather than full country names prevents the common problem of "United States" vs "USA" vs "US" creating separate segments in CRM systems. Real-world scenarios: migrating your customer list from one email marketing platform to another; importing trade show badge scans as contacts into a CRM; exporting a segment of contacts for a direct mail campaign. Tips: validate that all email addresses pass basic format validation before import — most CRMs reject invalid emails and can fail the entire import if they encounter too many. Strip all formatting characters from phone numbers (parentheses, dashes, spaces) before importing to ensure consistent storage.

first_name,last_name,email,phone,company,title,city,country
Alice,Johnson,[email protected],+1-555-0101,Acme Corp,CTO,San Francisco,US
Bob,Smith,[email protected],+1-555-0102,TechCo,Engineer,Austin,US
Carol,White,[email protected],+49-30-1234,EuroFirm GmbH,Director,Berlin,DE
Dave,Brown,[email protected],,StartupXYZ,Founder,London,GB
Eve,Davis,[email protected],+1-555-0105,Design Agency,Designer,New York,US