ChowNow’s Marketing Suite is designed to help you reach your full customer base — not just the diners who order online. By uploading your in-store marketing list, you can combine walk-ins, reservations, and other marketing sign-ups with your online ordering data into one unified list. 

Note: In-Store CSV List upload is available with ChowNow Grow and Elevate plans. Restaurants that upload their on-premise marketing list typically see up to 3x growth in their marketable audience, giving every campaign more reach and more revenue potential. Reach out to [email protected] to learn about upgrading.

How to Upload Your In-Store List

Step 1: Watch for an email from the ChowNow team

During onboarding, you’ll receive an email from our team with instructions for submitting your in-store marketing list as a CSV file.

Step 2: Review your list before submitting

Before sending your list, review it against the guardrails below. This step is critical — submitting a list that doesn’t meet these standards can hurt your campaign performance and, in some cases, get your sending number flagged by email and SMS providers.

Step 3: Submit your CSV list

Once your list is ready, send it back per the instructions in your onboarding email. Our team will run additional verifications to confirm contacts are valid and the list is clean before adding it to your marketing audience.

What Makes a List “Healthy”?

Email and SMS providers track how people engage with your messages. If too many recipients ignore them or mark them as spam, your future messages get filtered to junk — or blocked altogether. That’s why a healthy list starts with people who actually want to hear from you.

Before submitting your list, confirm:

  1. These contacts have received marketing email from your restaurant in the last 12 months, and/or
  2. These contacts have received marketing texts from your restaurant in the last 6 months

Any contact who hasn’t received recent digital marketing from you should be removed. When in doubt, leave them out — it’s better to start with a smaller, engaged list than risk deliverability problems that affect every campaign you send.

Where Your List Should Come From

Not all contact lists are created equal. Here’s what we accept:

  • Preferred sources: Marketing lists from a previous email or SMS platform, online reservation systems, or other tools where diners actively opted in to hear from your restaurant.
  • Requires confirmation: Contact lists pulled from your POS. These often include customers who paid by card or signed up for a receipt, but didn’t necessarily agree to receive marketing. Before submitting a POS list, confirm these contacts opted in to marketing communications.
  • Not accepted: Purchased or rented lists. These violate email and SMS marketing laws (including CAN-SPAM and TCPA), put your restaurant at legal risk, and almost always result in spam complaints that damage your sender reputation.

What Happens After You Submit

Once we receive your CSV, our team will:

  • Run validation checks to remove invalid email addresses and phone numbers
  • Flag any formatting issues or missing required fields
  • Confirm the final list size against your contact limit
  • Add the cleaned list to your marketing audience in ChowNow

You’ll be notified when your list is live and ready to use in campaigns.