Import Customer Data Overview

Blueshift supports multiple ways of importing customer data. After you import customer data into your Blueshift account, Blueshift can easily build a 360 degree view of all your customers.

Import methods

You can send customer data to Blueshift using any of the following methods:

Amazon S3 bucket	You can upload a customer data CSV file from an Amazon S3 bucket. Blueshift recommends that you use this method when possible. Configure the job to run hourly/daily/weekly. When the upload is done, you will get an email with the upload status. You can get high throughput with the customer attribute upload job. Blueshift can process around 1M users/hr and the background job also takes care of retries. For more information, see Customer data from S3.
Snowflake database	With the integration of Blueshift and Snowflake, you can import customer data into your Blueshift account very easily. Before you can import data from Snowflake you must set up integration of Blueshift with Snowflake and configure at least one adapter. For more information, see Customer data from Snowflake.
Blueshift UI	You can upload a customer data CSV file from the Blueshift UI. For more information, see Customer data from UI.
Customer Lists	You can upload a list of customers from the UI.
Mobile App	If you use Blueshift's SDKs to integrate your apps with Blueshift, you can send customer data to Blueshift. For more information, see Blueshift's Developer Portal.
APIs	Use Blueshift's APIs to send customer data to Blueshift. For more information, see APIs to import customer data.

Historical data

You can import historical customer data in CSV format into Blueshift to help build a better profile of your customers. For more information, see Historical Data.

User attributes to import

For a list of customer attributes supported by Blueshift, see Customer Attributes and Types. You can also include custom attributes as required.

Consider the following points about importing customer attributes into Blueshift:

When you import customer attributes, you can set the data type for any custom attributes in the import task.
Note: You cannot change the data type for a custom attribute once it is imported. If you have accidentally set the incorrect data type for a custom attribute, create a new attribute and re-upload customer data.
To update the value of any customer attributes, you must upload the data by using any of the import methods. Customer attributes cannot be updated from the customer profile.
If the Enable user updates option is set for a custom event, customer attributes are updated with the information contained in the event.
Note: The Enable user updates option is not available for standard events.

Data types supported

Blueshift supports the following data types:

String
Integer
Date
Decimal
Boolean data types
Array (via Snowflake only)
Object (via Snowflake only)

Note: Attributes with data type as Boolean cannot be set to a NULL or blank value and must be set as either true or false. If you require an attribute to have a blank values, use the a String data type instead of a Boolean data type.

Standard attributes

Here are some suggested attributes, but feel free to add additional ones as well.

phone_number	must include the country code start with a + follow the E.164 standard, contain 6 to 14 digits, and not start with a 0
email	Cannot have more than 256 characters. For an email address username@subdomain.topleveldomain.com, the following email syntax is acceptable according to RFC standard: The username can have a maximum of 64 characters and can consist of any combination of alphabetic characters, digits, or any of the following special characters: ! # $ % & ‘ * + – / = ? ^ _ ` . { \| } ~ The topleveldomain can have a maximum of 63 characters, cannot be all numerics and cannot start or end with a hyphen. The subdomain can have a maximum of 64 characters. The domain (for example .com, .gov. .edu and so on) can have a maximum of 63 characters.
gender	must be one of the following: male female unknown
unsubscribed	value can be true or false and must be in lower case.
joined_at	must be in ISO8601 format (1980-05-19T15:22:01-07:00). if you do not include joined_at during upload process, the joined_at date is set as the upload date. You can also format the date in excel/numbers using custom format to convert the date to ISO8601 format yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+/-00:00. Replace +/-00:00 with the time zone offset for your timezone.
Any dates	Dates can be converted in excel by using a function to add (=A2+TIME(8,0,0) ) or subtract hours (=A2-TIME(8,0,0)) so the time is represented in the UTC time. Replace A2 with the cell of the date you are converting. Please note that this is good for one time uploads as it does not take into account daylight savings for ongoing file uploads. For example: yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss-05:00 for Eastern (Est) timezone. Converting time = A2,5,0,0 will add 5 hours to the time converting EST timezome to UTC.