How to import contacts into HubSpot from an Excel or CSV file

Importing a contact list into HubSpot sounds simple — until HubSpot skips half your rows because the email column is named "Courriel", the phone numbers are inconsistent, or the same contact appears twice. Here is how to get a clean, HubSpot-ready file on the first try.

Why HubSpot rejects your file

HubSpot's contact importer expects specific column names (First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone Number…) and tidy values. A raw export from another tool rarely matches:

• Columns are named in your own language ("Prénom", "Téléphone") instead of HubSpot's.
• Emails carry trailing spaces or mixed case.
• Phone numbers are formatted every which way.
• The same person appears in two rows.

Any of these and HubSpot silently drops rows or creates duplicate contacts.

The manual way (and why it hurts)

You can fix it by hand: rename every column, find-and-replace the phone formats, sort and delete duplicates, double-check the encoding. It works — once. The next export, next week or next client, you start all over.

The fast way with Importly

1. Upload your .xlsx or .csv export — any structure, however messy.
2. Pick the "HubSpot — Contacts" profile. Importly renames your columns to HubSpot's exact schema ("Prénom" → "First Name", "Courriel" → "Email"), cleans every value, and removes duplicate contacts and empty rows.
3. Download the import-ready file and load it into HubSpot's importer. Clean headers, clean values, first try.

What actually gets cleaned

• Column mapping to HubSpot's field names — accents and casing handled.
• Emails trimmed and lower-cased, duplicates removed.
• Phone numbers normalized to a consistent format.
• Names tidied (capitalization and stray spaces).

You keep your original file; Importly produces a separate, import-ready copy.

Clean your first file free →