The Scenario
You are the marketing manager for a retail brand. The holiday season just ended, and the team collected 8,000 new opt-in phone numbers through in-store sign-up tablets and a holiday landing page. All of them are sitting in an Excel workbook — columns for Phone, FirstName, LastName, and Email — and the re-engagement SMS goes out tomorrow morning.
The bad version:
- Export the workbook as a CSV, open it in a text editor, and manually check that every phone number is in MSISDN format (country code prefix, no spaces, no dashes) — because Dripcel will reject anything that isn't.
- Upload the CSV to Dripcel's contact import screen, wait for the validation pass, then work through the error report row by row for every number that failed the format check.
- Repeat the whole process for the second batch your e-commerce team sent over this afternoon, which has different column headers.
The re-engagement SMS reaches customers who shopped with you two months ago. Every hour of delay is revenue sitting on the table — and the import is the thing standing between you and the send button.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your data and talks to Dripcel through its built-in integration, so you don't touch a CSV or an import screen.
Take every row in the 'Lead Import' Excel tab (column A = phone in MSISDN format, B = first name, C = last name) and upsert them all into Dripcel, updating existing contacts where the phone number already exists.
What You Get
- Every row from the 'Lead Import' tab pushed to Dripcel as a contact.
- Existing contacts updated rather than duplicated — SheetXAI uses upsert logic based on phone number.
- A summary written back to the workbook: how many contacts were created, how many were updated, how many failed.
- Any row-level errors surfaced in column D so you can see exactly which numbers were rejected and why.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The phone numbers have inconsistent formatting — some have a leading zero, some have a country code, some have dashes
Read all rows in the 'Lead Import' tab. Before importing, normalize column A to MSISDN format: strip dashes and spaces, remove any leading zeros, and prepend the +1 country code for numbers that don't already have one. Then upsert all rows into Dripcel and write a count of successful upserts to cell E1.
Some rows are missing a first name — and Dripcel requires it
Read all rows in the 'Lead Import' tab. For any row where column B (first name) is blank, substitute 'Friend' before sending to Dripcel. Import all rows and write any skipped row numbers into column D.
The contacts are split across two worksheets — 'Holiday Batch 1' and 'Holiday Batch 2' — with slightly different column layouts
Read all rows from both 'Holiday Batch 1' (Phone in column A, Name in column B) and 'Holiday Batch 2' (PhoneNumber in column A, FirstName in column B, LastName in column C). Merge and normalize them into a single contact list, then upsert all contacts into Dripcel. Write the total count to cell A1 of a new 'Import Summary' sheet.
You want to normalize, deduplicate, and import in one pass
Read all rows from the 'Lead Import' tab. Remove any rows where the phone number is a duplicate within the workbook. Normalize all phone numbers to MSISDN format. Then upsert all unique contacts into Dripcel and write a final summary — total rows, duplicates removed, contacts created, contacts updated, contacts failed — into cells A1 through E1.
The shortest path from a messy contact workbook to a ready Dripcel list is a single prompt that handles cleanup and import together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook where your opt-in contacts are sitting, then ask it to normalize and bulk-import your list into Dripcel before your next send. You can also look at how SheetXAI handles pre-campaign compliance screening or the full Dripcel integration overview.