Contact lists:: Exporting contact lists – Emarsys

To export a list of contacts, go to Contacts > Data Export > Contact list.

Exporting a contact list manually

To make a manual export of a list of contacts, proceed as follows:

Export includes – Here you specify if you want to export all contacts in the database, a specific segment or a contact list.

From now on, all segment types are available for export(previously, you could only export segments containing contact, email behavior, geolocation or Smart Insight criteria). Please note that although you can export contact lists including Relational Data or Web behavior segments, you can only populate the exported list with contact fields (e.g. you cannot add fields from your Relational database to the exported file).

Data will be sent by – Here you specify by which channel you want to export:
- Email – You must enter a valid email address; you can specify a subject line or use the default text. This email address will receive a download link which is password-protected; for the download you must enter your own Emarsys user credentials, even if it is not your own email address.
- SFTP – You must enter the corresponding access data (i.e. a host address, user name and password; the directory is optional).
- Local Delivery – The content is exported to the WebDAV folder that was configured during your account setup, and requires no further action by you.

Note: This feature is manually configured during setup and will not be visible by default.

Display Language – This language is used for the field names (e.g. first name, last name).
Field Separator – This separates the fields in the .csv file. Since different language versions of programs like Microsoft Excel might use different characters for separating fields in .csv files, with this option you can adapt the .csv export to suit the version you use.
Add field names to the first row of export file – This option is activated by default; it writes the field names to the top row of the exported file.
File name prefix – This will be the prefix added to the .csv file. Only English letters, digits, underscore or dash (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _, -) are supported.
Choose the fields for the export – Here you choose the database fields for the export.

In the left box you can select more than one field by pressing the CTRL key on your keyboard and selecting fields with the mouse. Move your selection to the right box by clicking . You can remove an entry by selecting it and clicking .

When you have applied all desired settings, click Export Now.

Internal ID in exports

During the export, the system assigns an Internal ID to each record. In fact, this ID was generated at the time the record was created: via online registration, manual entry or import. It remains invisible until an export is started. The Internal ID is unique and will later allow you to re-import the same file to Emarsys. If re-importing is not a concern, including the Internal ID in the export can be turned off by Emarsys Support on request. The Internal ID is called user_id in the exported csv file.

Internal IDs are unique among the live contacts in Emarsys but they are not eternally unique. If you delete a contact in Emarsys, its Internal ID can get reused by the system. In other words, you could possibly end up with two different exported contacts having the same Internal ID in the exported data outside Emarsys.

Example

You could export a list with invalid email addresses and correct them in Microsoft Excel. In order to re-import the records, you only need to provide the internal IDs and the updated email addresses. Emarsys will update the records in the database accordingly.