How to upload a list of SMS contacts

Klaviyo cannot add SMS consent if: 

• SMS isn’t set up in Klaviyo
• You’re trying to add consent for a country where SMS isn’t available
• Don’t have an SMS sending number for a country. 

The profiles are imported with phone numbers, but they wouldn’t have consent for SMS.  

To check your SMS setup and sending numbers, navigate to Settings > SMS.

If you don’t, every new contact from the CSV you uploaded will be added to any welcome flow. Thus, you should set your welcome flows to manual mode before importing. Welcome flows include those triggered by either: 

• The Consented to receive SMS metric (which is the best option for any SMS welcome series)
• The list you’re uploading to.

You should also wait at least 2 hours after the import finishes to turn these flows live again. 

Klaviyo uses either email or phone number as a profile’s unique identifier. 

When importing:

• Use email as the first column if you have an email address for each person
• Otherwise, use phone number as the first column

You need to indicate the country for each person you’re importing either by:

• Adding the country code before the phone number
• Including a column labeled “Country”

Example with country code	Example with country column

Watch the video or check out this article for instructions on indicating the SMS subscriber’s country. 

Say your CSV has a mix of marketing- and transactional-only profiles. 

You can use 2 columns to indicate the type (transactional or marketing) of someone’s SMS consent. Label the columns: 

• SMS Marketing Consent 
  • Marketing consent allows you to send any type of SMS: both promotional (product announcement, abandonment reminder, etc) and transactional messages.
  • This is required if you want to import profiles with only SMS marketing consent. 
• SMS Transactional Consent 
  • SMS transactional consent means you can only send messages marked as transactional in Klaviyo, like post-purchase flow messages. 
  • This column is only needed if you have transactional-only profiles, as you can send transactional messages to anyone who consented to SMS marketing.

Including the consent status is key if your CSV includes a mix of either:

• Subscribed and unsubscribed subscribers 
• Marketing- and transactional-only subscribers 

There are 3 consent statuses available: 

• Subscribe
  Person is opted in to receive messages. 
• Unsubscribed
  Person used to be subscribed but has since opted out. You cannot send messages if they are unsubscribed for that channel (e.g., you cannot send an SMS to someone who’s unsubscribed, but you may be able to send an email). 
• Never subscribed 
  Person never consented to receiving messages. This is also the default value if a cell in a consent column is blank. You cannot send mobile (SMS, push, etc.) messages to people marked as never subscribed; however, you can send emails and these are considered active profiles. 

Klaviyo will not apply SMS marketing consent if someone is marked as either unsubscribed or never subscribed. However, if they are marked as subscribed for marketing consent, they are always marked as subscribed for transactional consent. 

The way SMS providers export this information varies, so you may have to reformat the spreadsheet you received from your previous SMS provider to indicate the consent status.

While optional, the timestamp is usually good to include if it’s available. To do so, check that:

• The timestamp is in an accepted date/time format.
• The column is labeled either:
  • SMS Marketing Timestamp
  • SMS Transactional Timestamp (if also importing transactional consent)

If you choose not to include the timestamp, you will need to check a box to confirm that all profiles are currently opted into SMS. 

Adding the consent timestamp is not recommended in certain cases. Mostly, this occurs if you try to re-upload consent for a profile and the opt-out date is more recent than the consent timestamp. In this case, SMS consent won't be re-added to the profile. 

Some information is "recommended" because it's helpful, but not required to add SMS consent. There are also columns you may think are helpful, but could cause errors in the import process.

See the table below for details of other information you may want to (or not want to) include.