CRM & Contacts
The unified contacts center: groups, custom attributes, Excel import, and the Leads Hub.
Every message Mersal sends — SMS, WhatsApp, or Email — goes out to someone in your Contacts. This page covers how contacts are organized, how to get them into the system in bulk, and how the Leads Hub feeds new contacts in from lead generation.
Groups
Contacts live in groups. Every account starts with a default My Customers group, and you can create as many additional groups as you need — by source, segment, campaign, or however your audience is structured. A contact can be moved between groups at any time, and campaigns target one or more groups as their recipient list.
Custom attributes
Beyond the standard fields (name, phone, email), contacts support inline custom attributes — extra fields you define yourself, with 12 attribute types available to match the kind of data you're storing (text, number, date, and other structured types). This lets you keep things like order history, customer tier, or preferred language attached directly to the contact, and use them later for segmentation or personalized messaging.
Importing contacts from Excel
Rather than adding contacts one at a time, the professional Excel import lets you bring in your whole list at once:
- Upserts automatically — rows that match an existing contact update that contact instead of creating a duplicate.
- Cleans and normalizes phone numbers — inconsistent formatting, spacing, or missing country codes are corrected automatically during import, so your list is send-ready immediately.
Run a small test import first if you're mapping a new spreadsheet layout — it's the fastest way to confirm your columns line up with the expected fields before committing a full list.
For a step-by-step walkthrough, see Importing Contacts from Excel.
Search, export, and bulk actions
The contacts center supports:
- Search — find contacts quickly across your groups.
- Export — pull contacts back out, for backup or use outside Mersal.
- Archive — remove contacts from active sending without permanently deleting them.
- Bulk actions — apply group changes, archiving, or other operations to many contacts at once instead of one by one.
The Leads Hub
Contacts you add manually or import are ready to message immediately. But leads coming from scraping tools (Google Maps, websites) go through a separate holding area first: the Leads Hub. There, scraped leads can be reviewed, normalized, and verified before you promote them into regular Contacts — keeping unverified or messy scraped data out of your main sending list until it's been checked.
See Lead Generation for how leads get into the Leads Hub in the first place.