The Scenario
You are an email marketing manager at a digital agency. It is Thursday afternoon and a new client campaign launches Friday at 8 AM. The client sent over a list of 500 new subscribers in an Excel workbook — email in column A, first name in column B, company in column C, all in the Contacts tab. They need to be in the right BigMailer brand and assigned to the Newsletter list before the campaign fires.
The slow version of Thursday afternoon:
- Save the Contacts tab as a CSV from Excel
- Log into BigMailer, navigate to the client's brand
- Find the contact import flow, upload the file
- Remap the columns because "First Name" in the workbook is "firstname" in BigMailer
- Submit, wait for the import job to process
- Come back to check for failed rows
- Manually fix the ones that failed
- The campaign fires Friday morning with 47 contacts missing because the import timed out.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your workbook that reads the Contacts tab and calls the BigMailer batch API for you, so you do not have to touch a CSV export or a column-mapping UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Batch-import all contacts from the Contacts tab into my BigMailer brand using the batch endpoint. Use column A for email, column B for first name, column C for company. Assign them to the list in cell B1 and write the batch ID to cell D1.
SheetXAI reads the Contacts tab, calls the BigMailer batch contact endpoint, and writes the batch ID into D1. Failed rows get flagged with the reason.
What You Get
A confirmed batch import with three things written back into the workbook:
- Batch job ID in D1 — your audit record for the import
- Row count confirmation — how many contacts were queued successfully
- Failure list — any rows BigMailer rejected, with the reason per row
The import runs against the batch endpoint, not the one-at-a-time contact API. Five hundred rows go in as one API call. You get a batch ID you can reference if BigMailer support ever asks what happened.
If the client sends a corrected file next week with updates to some of these same contacts, give SheetXAI the same shape of prompt but tell it to upsert instead of create, and it handles the logic.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real subscriber lists from clients are rarely import-ready. SheetXAI handles cleanup and the import in the same prompt.
When email addresses have inconsistent formatting
Some emails have trailing spaces, some have uppercase domains, some have obvious typos like "gmial.com."
Normalize all email addresses in column A of the Contacts tab: trim whitespace, lowercase the domain portion, and flag rows where the domain looks like a common typo (gmial, yahooo, hotmial) by writing "CHECK" into column D. Then upload the remaining valid rows to the BigMailer brand using the list name in cell B1.
When the company column is mostly blank
The client filled in company for enterprise contacts but left it blank for consumers. You want to import both but handle them differently.
For rows in the Contacts tab where column C is blank, set the company field to 'Individual' before importing. Then upload all rows to the BigMailer brand using the list name in cell B1. Write the batch ID into cell D1.
When a subset of rows should go to a different list
The client flagged VIP contacts in column D. They go to a separate BigMailer list.
Split the contacts in the Contacts tab into two groups: rows where column D is 'VIP' go to the 'VIP Newsletter' list, all other rows go to the list named in cell B1. Import both groups into the BigMailer brand and write both batch IDs into cells E1 and E2.
When the workbook has duplicates and stale contacts mixed in
The client assembled the list from three sources and there are duplicates plus some known unsubscribes.
Deduplicate column A of the Contacts tab by email, keeping the first occurrence. Remove any rows where the Status column is 'unsubscribed'. Normalize email formatting. Then upload the cleaned list to the BigMailer brand using the list name in cell B1. Write a summary — total rows, duplicates removed, unsubscribes skipped, contacts imported — into cells E1 through E4.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the workbook in a separate pass and then importing, you ask for both in one prompt. The campaign goes out Friday with the right contacts.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a contact list, then ask it to import the rows into BigMailer. The BigMailer integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more, see how to upsert a CRM export into BigMailer from Excel or the BigMailer in Excel overview.