Sitecore Send: | Contact import rejected
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“Import Rejected” – do you know this error in Sitecore Send? Our Sitecore Expert and MVP Dirk Schäfauer also received this error message when he tried to import his contacts. He explains how he solved the problem in his guest article.
When importing contacts into Sitecore Send, it may happen that the import is rejected. The displayed error message is not very helpful and does not describe why the import failed.
Are special characters the problem?
The source file was a .CSV file with French contacts. As you know, these names have a lot of special characters, so I created two small test files with 2-3 contacts: One with special characters and one without special characters to exclude this case.
Both files could be imported without any problems. The special characters were displayed as expected in Sitecore Send – so that wasn’t it. Out of desperation I tried to save the file in UTF-8, which of course didn’t work either. My insight: It is not because of the special characters.
Next idea: Split the file into several parts to possibly narrow down the error. So I split the source file into 3 parts with 1000 contacts each and lo and behold: the import worked with all 3 parts … So it could not be due to the data itself!
It’s all about the bounce rate!
At the same time I wrote to the support what could be the reason that the import fails. In addition, I did some analysis of my own. What I noticed: In each of the 3 imports, quite a few contacts were excluded because they were already on the suppression list.
Support has also confirmed this assumption!
I have made a simple calculation:
Anzahl der ignorierten Kontakte x 100 : Anzahl der gesamten KontakteA simple rule of three that yields a bounce rate of about 5%. Support also confirmed this invoice to me. Thus, the bounce rate must be less than 3%. Otherwise the import will always fail!
Solution: As of now, there is no proven solution except to split the file into several parts. However, the suppression list can also be exported as a .CSV file. For this reason, I am currently working on a tool that compares the suppression list with the list to be imported, determines the entries found and generates a cleaned .CSV file as a result.
So, stay tuned!
Happy Dataschubbsing!
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