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 a Google Sheet — columns for Phone, FirstName, LastName, and Email — and the re-engagement SMS goes out tomorrow morning.
The bad version:
- Export the sheet 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 Google Sheet. It reads your data and talks to Dripcel through its built-in integration, so you don't touch a CSV or an import screen.
Read all rows in the 'Opt-In Contacts' sheet (columns: Phone, FirstName, LastName, Email) and bulk-create them in Dripcel using the create_contacts endpoint. Normalize all phone numbers to MSISDN format before sending. Write a summary of how many were created successfully into cell A1.
What You Get
- Every row from the 'Opt-In Contacts' sheet pushed to Dripcel as a new contact.
- Phone numbers normalized to MSISDN format inline — SheetXAI handles the prefix check before the API call.
- A summary written to cell A1: how many contacts were created, how many were skipped or failed.
- Any row-level errors surfaced in column F 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 'Opt-In Contacts' sheet. 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 bulk-create all rows in Dripcel and write a count of successful creates to cell A1.
Some rows are missing a first name — and Dripcel requires it
Read all rows in the 'Opt-In Contacts' sheet. For any row where FirstName (column B) is blank, substitute 'Friend' before sending to Dripcel. Import all rows and write any skipped row numbers into column F.
The contacts are split across two tabs — '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 bulk-create all contacts in 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 'Opt-In Contacts'. Remove any rows where the phone number is a duplicate within the sheet. Normalize all phone numbers to MSISDN format. Then bulk-create all unique contacts in Dripcel and write a final summary — total rows, duplicates removed, contacts created, contacts failed — into cells A1 through D1.
The shortest path from a messy contact sheet 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 Google Sheet 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.