Prepare a great lead file

Who this is for: anyone building or buying lead lists who wants clean imports, low bounce rates and emails that sound personal.

The quality of your file decides the quality of every email. The AI only knows what is in the row and on the lead’s website, so a richer, cleaner row means a better email.

The ideal layout

One header row, one lead per row, one fact per column:

Email,Contact,Practice,Website,City,Specialty
sarah@brightsmiles.com,Dr. Sarah Kim,Bright Smiles Dental,brightsmiles.com,Austin,Family dentistry
james@riveraortho.com,Dr. James Rivera,Rivera Orthodontics,riveraortho.com,Dallas,Orthodontics

• Email: one address per cell. The first valid address in the row is used if the email cell is empty or broken.
• Website: the company’s own site. Plain brightsmiles.com is fine; we add https://.
• Contact name: a full name, or two columns First name and Last name, which are joined for you.
• Company: a column named Company, Business, Practice or Organization shows in the Company column of the list.

Name your columns so they match themselves

Columns named like these are matched without any clicking:

Add columns the AI can use

Every column is passed to the AI with the lead, so extra facts become personal touches. Good ones:

• City or Region (“practices in Austin”)
• Specialty or Industry
• Job title
• A recent event: new location, new hire, award, review score
• Your own note: “met at the Dallas dental expo”

Use short, clear values. A column named Note with “Asked about pricing in May” is worth more than ten generic columns.

Clean before you upload

1. Remove duplicates of the same email address. The importer does not merge duplicates, so the same person would get two emails.
2. Remove role addresses you do not want, such as info@, office@, noreply@. The verifier marks them Risky anyway.
3. Fix obvious typos like gmial.com or .con. The verifier catches these as Invalid with a suggested fix, but fixing them first saves verifications.
4. Delete empty rows and summary rows (totals, notes at the bottom of a sheet).
5. One sheet only. Excel files use the first sheet.

Excel and encoding traps

• Dates in Excel are stored as numbers. An .xlsx date cell arrives as a number like 45580. If dates matter, format the column as text in Excel or save the sheet as CSV first.
• Formulas arrive as their stored value. Paste values before uploading if you are unsure.
• Special characters (é, ü, ñ) are fine in UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 and Windows-1252. If names look garbled after the import, save the file as CSV UTF-8 in Excel and upload it again.
• Very long cells are cut at 10,000 characters.

Size and splitting

• Files can be up to 25 MB. Bigger files: split them into several lists.
• Your plan sets how many active leads you can hold. Check it in Account before uploading a big file; an import that reaches the limit stops and keeps what it imported.
• Split by segment (city, specialty) when the segments need different instructions. One list per campaign keeps your results easy to read.

A pre-flight checklist

• Header row on row 1, one lead per row
• Email column present; duplicates removed
• Website column for every lead you want researched
• Name column (or first + last)
• 2 to 4 useful extra columns for personalisation
• Clients, partners and competitors on the do-not-email list
• Verify after import (paid plans), then clean up

Next step

Before your first campaign, check every address: How email verification works.