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Turning your phone contacts into an SMS marketing list, properly
Small businesses run on the owner's phone book. Years of customers, suppliers, the plumber, your cousin, a man called Dave you met once at a trade show. It is the most valuable list you own and the least organised.
Getting it into a usable state is a data problem. Deciding who on it you are allowed to text is a legal one. Both need answering, and the second one first.
The consent question, honestly
Having someone's number because you did business together does not constitute marketing consent. This is the uncomfortable part. A customer who called you about a repair in 2023 has not agreed to receive your promotions.
The clean route is to use the list for a one-time opt-in request through a channel you are already permitted to use, then market only to the people who say yes. The list shrinks. The remaining list is one you can actually use without looking over your shoulder.
Getting the data out
iOS gives you no way to export contacts in bulk. You can share one contact as a vCard, and that is the extent of it. For a few thousand contacts this is not a workflow.
The options are syncing to a desktop and exporting from there, which pulls your contacts through a third-party service, or exporting on the phone directly. Exporting to CSV on the device keeps the data local, which matters more than usual when the data is other people's phone numbers.
What the file needs to contain
One row per person. A name column. A phone column in E.164. No duplicates. No rows where the phone field is empty.
That last one sounds trivial and is not: a typical phone book has a few hundred entries that are email-only or just a name attached to nothing. They inflate your list count and some importers choke on them. Stripping them at export is one toggle.
Then split it
If your contacts span countries, upload them as separate campaigns rather than one. Costs, timezones and consent rules all differ by market, and grouping by country at export gives you one file each.
Pluck on the App Store does the export, the deduplication, the formatting and the country split on the phone, without the contacts touching a server.
Separate the business contacts from the rest
Your phone book has your dentist, your landlord and three people called Mum. None of them belong in a marketing campaign, and the fastest way to look unprofessional is to text them a promotion.
Export first, then prune in the spreadsheet where you can see names in bulk. It is far easier to spot who should not be there in a list view than in the Contacts app.
What a good opt-in message looks like
Short, honest about what you are asking, and easy to decline. Say who you are, say what you would send and how often, and give them a way to say yes. People who say yes to that are worth more than ten times as many who never agreed to anything.
Keep the export, do not keep syncing
Resist the urge to wire your phone book directly into a marketing platform through a sync tool. Every new number you save then becomes a marketing contact by default, which is exactly the consent problem you just worked to avoid.
A deliberate export, pruned and opted in, beats an automatic sync that quietly grows.
Get Pluck for iPhone
Pluck does the steps in this guide on your iPhone, with no server, no account, and no analytics. Group your contacts by country, find duplicates the iOS tool misses, and export to CSV, Excel, TXT, or vCard.