Add and manage people in an audience

What this guide is for

Populate an audience one person at a time or from a file, then maintain its memberships. New people added through these audience flows are audience members, not automatically CRM contacts. Existing matching contacts can belong to the audience without becoming duplicates.

Before you start

• Open Audiences and the audience you want to populate. You need management access; viewer roles cannot add or import people.
• Check the header's audience name before changing its membership. On a phone, open Actions for Add person or Import; larger screens also show these buttons directly.
• For a manual addition, prepare a name and an email address or phone number. For an import, at least one file column must be mapped to email or phone.
• Use only information you are entitled to store and use. Importing a phone number or email address does not itself establish messaging consent.

Add one person manually

1. Choose Add person. A dialog explains: Enter a name and an email address or phone number.
2. Fill Name, up to 120 characters in this form.
3. Fill Email, Phone, or both. A name without either identity field cannot be submitted. Enter a valid email address and a valid phone number; including the international country code helps avoid ambiguity.
4. Click Add person. The service checks existing identities before creating a new person.
5. If a visible person is matched by phone under a different name, the dialog can ask This phone number belongs to {name}. Add this existing contact? Verify that it really is the same person, then click Add existing contact. Cancel returns to the input form so you can correct it.
6. After success, the dialog closes and the audience's people data refreshes. Find the person in People to confirm the membership.

The matching prompt is not shown for every existing identity. An email match, or a matching name, can be linked without that extra prompt. Linking an existing contact does not transfer ownership of the contact or grant access to private information.

Prepare a CSV or XLSX file

The file picker accepts .csv and .xlsx; old .xls files are not accepted. The first row must contain unique, non-empty column headers, each at most 200 characters long. Keep phone values as text in your spreadsheet so leading zeroes and country codes are not lost before uploading.

Limit	What it means
CSV: up to 100 MB	The upload limit is 100 × 1,024 × 1,024 bytes. The audience CSV import does not use Excel's 5,000-data-row cap.
XLSX: up to 2 MB	The upload limit is 2 × 1,024 × 1,024 bytes. The workbook must also pass the Excel safety checks.
XLSX: up to 5,000 data rows plus a header	Oversized or unsafe workbooks are rejected rather than silently importing only the first 5,000 people.
XLSX: up to 100 columns and 500 characters per cell	Workbook structure and expanded content also have safety limits; a small file can still be rejected.
Up to 40 audience fields	This is the destination audience's total field limit, not 40 extra fields for every upload.
Audience-field labels: 1–100 characters	Kept fields need non-empty labels.

For large or complex Excel files, save the relevant sheet as CSV. Keep only the columns you need. More than 40 automatically proposed extra audience fields can cause the preview to be rejected before the mapping screen; reduce the file's columns in that case.

Import into this audience

1. Inside the audience, click Import. The Import people dialog opens and displays its file limits.
2. Under Choose a CSV or Excel file, select the file. Reading file… appears while the upload is read.
3. When preview succeeds, inspect Preview (first 5 rows). This is a sample, not proof that every row in the file is valid.
4. Review the suggested column mappings for Name, Email, Phone, and Tags. Choose the corresponding file header in each dropdown, or Don't import for an unused identity field. You must map at least Email or Phone.
5. Review New audience fields. For each extra column, keep its checkbox selected to retain it as an audience-specific field, edit Field label if needed, or use Don't import to drop it. Columns already mapped to identity fields or automatically matched CRM fields do not also appear as new audience fields.
6. Check that kept field labels are non-empty and that the final field set fits within 40 fields. Existing CRM custom fields whose labels match a header can be recognized automatically; the dialog does not provide a separate manual CRM-field mapping editor.
7. Click Start import. It remains unavailable until the mapping is valid. The dialog changes to Importing… {processed} rows once the request starts.
8. Wait for the result. You may use Close after the import starts: You may close this window. The import will continue. Closing the window does not cancel the background import.
9. On completion, review Import finished and the added, updated, and skipped counts. The dialog can display up to five sampled row errors. Click Done and inspect People.

To create a new audience from a file instead, use Import on the main Audiences list. The same mapping dialog also includes New audience name, initially based on the filename. Set that name before Start import; successful completion opens the resulting audience. The detail-page import does not ask for a new name because its target is already selected.

Understand the import result

• Email and phone identities are normalized and matched to existing people. Import does not deliberately create a second CRM contact just because the person appears in another audience.
• A row with neither a usable email nor a usable phone is skipped. If one identity is invalid but the other is usable, the usable identity can still be imported.
• Repeated identities can be skipped. A skipped count is not exclusively a count of errors; not every skipped duplicate receives a row-error sample.
• Existing non-empty CRM names, tags, and custom values are not indiscriminately overwritten. Where permitted, the importer can fill missing values; imported audience-specific values belong to that membership.
• A new person is stored as an Audience member. Use Promote to contact when CRM promotion is intended.
• A failed import can have already committed earlier rows. Check the counts and current membership before uploading again; failure does not mean the entire import was rolled back.
• An unstarted preview expires after 24 hours. Choose the file again if a preview has expired.

For tags, separate values with commas, semicolons, or |. The importer keeps at most 20 distinct tags per row, with each tag limited to 40 characters. Imported names are limited to 120 characters, and audience-field values to 2,000 characters; do not use this flow to preserve longer text verbatim.

Find and select people

1. Open People. Use Search people and, as needed, Has email, Agreed to email, Tag, or Field with Value. Phone layouts place filters in a filter sheet.
2. Clear restrictive filters if the expected person is missing. No people match these filters. does not necessarily mean the audience is empty.
3. Select the checkboxes next to the people to change. Select all loaded people selects the currently loaded rows, not every matching person on the server.
4. Use Load more to fetch more rows when available. Rows load in batches of 50; bulk selection is limited to 5,000 people. Changing the search or filters clears the selection.
5. Open Actions for the selected people.

A clickable person's name opens the accessible record. Private contact and non-clickable limited details reflect privacy restrictions, not a broken link.

Choose the correct people action

Action	Result and next step
Copy to audience…	Choose a manageable destination in Choose an audience, then Confirm. The original membership remains.
Move to audience…	Choose the destination, then Confirm. The selected people leave this audience and join the destination.
New audience from selection	Enter Name, choose Move or Copy, then Confirm. The new audience opens; the chosen mode determines whether the original membership remains.
Remove from audience	Removes only the selected memberships from this audience. It does not globally delete the people or remove other memberships.
Promote to contact	Promotes eligible, visible audience-tier people to CRM contacts. This is not required merely to keep someone in an audience.
Don't email	Applies email suppression to eligible selected people with an email address. It does not remove audience membership.
Allow email again	Offered for manually suppressed email addresses. It is not a way to override every suppression reason or create consent.
Delete person	Opens a global-deletion confirmation. This is not a synonym for removing a membership.

For Delete person, read Delete the selected people? They will be removed from all audiences. before Confirm. It is available only when the selection contains eligible audience-tier people rather than contacts or hidden members; the server also enforces person access and frozen-record restrictions. Contacts must be handled from Contacts, not deleted through this command.

If something goes wrong

Symptom	Cause or recovery
File too large	Reduce the file or use CSV for a list that exceeds Excel's limits. Renaming an XLSX file to CSV is not conversion.
Only CSV and Excel files	Select .csv or .xlsx; save .xls in one of those formats first.
This Excel file is too big or can't be read. Save it as CSV and try again.	Size, row, column, cell, workbook safety, or parsing constraints can reject Excel. Export a simpler CSV and choose it again.
Preview fails before mapping	Check unique non-empty headers, readable CSV/XLSX content, and the number of extra fields. Remove unnecessary columns and use Choose another file if the mapping screen is already open.
Map an email or phone column	Select a header for Email or Phone. Mapping Name alone is insufficient.
Check the field labels and selected columns.	Check kept labels and the 40-field limit. Existing destination fields count toward that total.
Could not refresh import progress.	Use Retry in the dialog. A progress-refresh error does not itself mean the background import failed; do not immediately start another upload.
The import failed.	Read the counts and sampled Row {row}: {reason} messages. Correct unusable identities or file content; inspect partial results before retrying.
Delete person is disabled	The selection includes a contact or hidden person. Use Remove from audience if only membership should change; manage contact deletion in Contacts.
This person is no longer available. or a frozen-contact message appears	The record or your access changed, or the owner's departure is unresolved. Refresh the view; ask the owner/admin to resolve the underlying access or hold.

Related pages

• Audiences overview
• Create and manage an audience
• Use audiences
• Contacts and CRM
• Add a contact