Most contacts arrive on their own, as people use your product or write to you. Importing is for the ones that already exist somewhere else.
The Import menu at the top of Contacts offers four sources: Intercom, HubSpot, Zendesk and a CSV file.
The three tool imports ask for API credentials — Zendesk also wants your subdomain and the email of the account the token belongs to — and then pull contacts across. Use them once, when you move; they're a migration step rather than a sync.
Upload the file, then map its columns onto Gleap's fields. Anything you've defined as a contact attribute can be a target, so a column your team has been keeping in a spreadsheet doesn't have to be discarded.
Each row is matched against the contacts you already have — first on the user id, then on the email address — and updates that contact instead of creating a second one. Only a row matching nobody creates a new contact.
Two practical consequences: re-running the same file doesn't duplicate anyone, and an import is a reasonable way to bulk-update attributes on contacts that already exist.
Email matching tolerates casing, so a row for “[email protected]” finds a contact stored as “[email protected]”. Rows carrying neither a user id nor an email have no identity to match on, and each one becomes its own contact.
The user id. Import the same id your product sends to Gleap.identify. It's the strongest match there is, and it's what keeps an imported row and the live contact as one person rather than two.
Dates. A sign-up date that imports as text can't be filtered on — check one contact after the import rather than discovering it in a segment months later.
Try a handful of rows first. It's much easier to check ten contacts than to unpick ten thousand.
Next to Import is Unsubscribe, which takes a CSV as well. If you're migrating from another tool, run your existing unsubscribe list through it before you send anything — an import brings people across, it doesn't bring their preferences.
For a single contact — someone who phoned, or a customer you want on a pipeline before they've ever used the messenger — Add contact creates one directly.
Contact export lives in your project's data export settings, and it's limited to administrators. It exports contacts that have an email address, as a CSV.
You choose the audience — all contacts, users, guests, unsubscribed, or one of your custom lists — and optionally a date range.
A single contact can also be exported from their own page, which is the practical answer to a data request about one person.
An export is a file of personal data on someone's laptop, outside everything Gleap does to protect it. Export what you need, and delete the file when you're done with it.
