Upload a CSV of contacts and assign it to a list

Contacts you upload to OutreachFox live in the Contacts area and are organised into lists. A list can then be attached to any campaign, so you upload once and reuse the same leads everywhere. This article covers uploading a CSV and putting it in a list. Duplicate handling and column mapping are covered in the next article.

Prerequisites

• A CSV file with one contact per row and a header row. At minimum include an email column; first name, last name and company make personalisation possible.
• UTF-8 encoding. Export from Excel or Google Sheets as CSV (UTF-8).

Steps

1. In your OutreachFox account, click Contacts in the left navigation.

1. Click Upload Contacts.

1. Drag and drop your CSV onto the upload area, or click the area to browse and select the file from your computer, then open it.

1. When the file finishes uploading, choose the list to assign these contacts to. Pick an existing list from the dropdown, or create a new list and give it a name.

1. Continue to the duplicate-handling and column-mapping screens (see Handle duplicates and map CSV columns to contact fields) and click Save and Continue to finish.

After the import completes, the contacts appear under Contacts and in the list you selected. You can now select that list when adding leads to a campaign.

Tips

• Name lists by segment and date, for example SaaS CTOs – Sep 2026. It makes reuse and clean-up easier later.
• Keep one list per ICP or per data source rather than one giant list; campaigns and reporting stay cleaner.
• Verify emails before uploading (see Email verification: how it works and what each status means). Uploading unverified lists is the most common cause of bounce rates above 3%.
• Remove rows with no email address before uploading; they cannot be contacted and only add noise.

Troubleshooting

• File not accepted: confirm the extension is .csv and the first row is a header. XLSX files must be exported to CSV first.
• Special characters look wrong (accented names, umlauts): re-export the file as CSV UTF-8.
• Fewer contacts imported than rows in the file: rows without a valid email, or duplicates you chose to skip, are not imported.

Related articles

• Handle duplicates and map CSV columns to contact fields
• Add more leads to an active campaign (from a list or a new CSV)
• Import leads from Google Sheets or your CRM
• Email verification: how it works and what