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Email touchpoint - Creating your file with participant data: best practices
If you are planning to upload participants to an email touchpoint via File Transfer Protocol (FTPS) or manually to the platform, you will have to use either CSV files. The files containing all your participants and eventual metadata are called respondent or participant files.
IN THIS ARTICLE
1. Looking at the general rules
If you are planning on uploading a participant file, you must respect a specific set of general rules. If these rules are not respected, the upload will fail.
- Make sure that the first row of each column is NOT empty.
- The headers must be placed in the first row of each column.
- Email address and language columns are obligatory.
- Use the 2 digit ISO 639-1 format in the language column (you can find the list with all supported languages below).
- Give your participant files a unique name with a date (especially when uploading via FTPS).
Download a participant template from the following link:
IMPORTANT :This is an example of a good Excel file:
The Email address column is obligatory. There cannot be any empty field in the Email address column or the upload will fail. The platform will only recognizes unique emails. This means that an email address appearing more than once in a list of participants, only 1 survey invitation will be sent out.
The language column also is obligatory, even if your touchpoint only uses one language.
Simply enter that language's ISO code in the language column. So: NL for Dutch, EN for English, FR for French, DE for German, IT for Italian and so on (2 digit ISO 639-1 Code).
Below you can find a list with all the supported languages together with its ISO 639-1 code:
| AR | Arabic |
| BG | Bulgarian |
| CA | Catalan |
| CS | Czech |
| DA | Danish |
| DE | German |
| EL | Greek |
| EN | English |
| ES | Spanish |
| ET | Estonian |
| FI | Finnish |
| FR | French |
| GA | Irish |
| HR | Croatian |
| HU | Hungarian |
| IT | Italian |
| LT | Lithuanian |
| LV | Latvian |
| MT | Malti |
| NL | Dutch |
| NO | Norsk |
| PL | Polish |
| PT | Portuguese |
| RO | Romanian |
| RU | Russian |
| SK | Slovak |
| SL | Slovenian |
| SV | Swedish |
| TR | Turkish |
| ZH | Chinese |
2. Preparing CSV files
CSV files (Comma Separated Values) are plain text files that store tabular data
Many CRM (or other customer data systems) do not support exporting XLSX files. Therefore, CSV files are a good alternative.
IMPORTANT: Our platform can only read CSV files that meet certain requirements. Below are the two types of CSV files and their requirements.
Type 1: When using commas as a separator
- Do not use commas in your numeric values, for example as decimal separator. Use a dot (.) instead [3,000] becomes [3.000]
- Fields that contain commas (,) or double quotation marks (") must be delimited with double quotation marks ("). [cats, dogs, "birds"] becomes [cats"," dogs"," ""birds""]
Type 2: When using a semicolon as a separator (preferred):
- Do not quote values like you would with a comma separated file!
More information on the rules for CSV files can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values