The Scenario
You are a CRM admin. You just finished a contact data cleanup project — 300 rows, cleaned and deduplicated, with an active/unsubscribed status column. The contacts need to go into BigMailer: create the ones that do not exist yet, update the ones that do, and leave the unsubscribed rows out.
A simple import would ignore the existing contacts and create duplicates. An upsert does the right thing: email is the key, new email creates a contact, existing email updates it, unsubscribed rows get skipped.
The slow version:
- Export the sheet as a CSV
- Try to find the upsert endpoint in BigMailer's documentation
- Write a script or use a Zapier multi-step zap
- Handle the "skip unsubscribed" logic as a separate filter step
- Debug why 23 contacts were created as duplicates instead of updated
- Three hours later, the list still has stale data in it.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the sheet and calls BigMailer's upsert contact API with the right logic, including the conditional skip for unsubscribed rows.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Upsert every row from this sheet into BigMailer brand 'abc' — create new contacts and update existing ones using email as the key, but skip rows where the Status column is 'unsubscribed'. Write a summary into row 1: total rows, upserted, skipped.
SheetXAI reads the rows, identifies the status values, calls the upsert endpoint per contact with email as the deduplication key, skips the flagged rows, and writes a summary into the top of the sheet.
What You Get
A confirmed upsert run with results written back into the sheet:
- Summary in row 1 — total rows processed, contacts upserted, rows skipped
- Inline flags — any rows that failed the upsert with the reason
- Clean list in BigMailer — new contacts created, stale data updated, opt-outs untouched
The upsert uses email as the key. If a contact already exists in the brand, BigMailer updates their fields. If they are new, BigMailer creates them. You do not get duplicates.
If the client wants a second pass next month with the same logic but a different export, the same prompt works on the new sheet.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
CRM exports are rarely clean. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the upsert in the same prompt.
When status values are inconsistent across the export
Some rows say "unsubscribed," some say "Unsubscribed," some say "opted out," some say "inactive." Your upsert logic needs to catch all of them.
Before upserting, normalize the Status column: treat 'Unsubscribed', 'unsubscribed', 'opted out', and 'inactive' all as unsubscribed. Skip those rows. Upsert all remaining rows into BigMailer brand 'abc' using email as the key.
When some contacts should be suppressed rather than just skipped
The compliance team wants unsubscribed contacts added as suppressed in BigMailer, not just omitted from the import.
For rows where Status is 'unsubscribed', add the email to the BigMailer suppression list for brand 'abc'. For all other rows, upsert the contact normally using email as the key. Write a summary: contacts upserted, contacts suppressed, rows skipped for other reasons.
When the export has a custom field that needs mapping to a BigMailer field
The CRM export uses "Subscription Plan" as the column name, but BigMailer expects a custom field called "plan."
Before upserting, map the 'Subscription Plan' column in this sheet to the BigMailer custom field named 'plan'. Then upsert all non-unsubscribed rows into BigMailer brand 'abc' using email as the key. Include the plan value in each upsert call.
When the full chain is raw export → clean → deduplicate → upsert → summarize
You pulled a raw export and have not touched it. There are duplicates, inconsistent statuses, blank first names, and a custom field that needs renaming.
Clean this contact export: deduplicate by email keeping the most recent row, normalize status values (unsubscribed/opted out/inactive all become 'unsubscribed'), fill blank first names with 'Friend', and map 'Subscription Plan' to the BigMailer custom field 'plan'. Skip all unsubscribed rows. Upsert the remaining contacts into BigMailer brand 'abc' using email as the key. Write the results into a new tab called 'Upsert Results' with columns for email, action (created/updated/skipped), and any error message.
The pattern: cleanup and upsert in one prompt. You do not need a separate cleaning pass before you can run the import.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any CRM export with a status column, then ask it to upsert the contacts into BigMailer. The BigMailer integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to upload a suppression list from a sheet or the BigMailer in Google Sheets overview.