How should I format my file for upload?

Help Center  ❯  InstantData  ❯  File Type & Formatting

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