Creating Marketing Lists from External Data Sources

Using Advanced Find to filter and find the right audience when you’re creating Marketing Lists in Dynamics CRM works great if the data you need exists in your CRM system (contacts, leads, accounts, etc.). But, sometimes the segmentation data you need isn’t in CRM, it exists in another system. Well, you don’t have to wait until these other systems are integrated with CRM to use CRM’s marketing features. Simply using the import feature does the trick!

Today’s blog will focus on how to create marketing lists with external data sources. So let’s get started!

This process works best if you have a unique ID (UID) for the external data that you also maintain in CRM. The UID allows you to simply query your other system for the desired marketing list records based on the matching UID’s from CRM. Other possible unique IDs such as email address, phone number, full name, and street address 1 are also valuable.

Using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM out of the box Import Wizard, you can find the contacts in CRM that match the unique ID in the external data source. And since the Import Wizard is used to create records in CRM, you can import notes regarding the contact as well.

Let’s take a look at an example.

The list below represents a list in Excel (.csv) that was exported from another system.

1. Using the Import Data Wizard, find your .csv file.

2. Next, select Default (Automatic Mapping) from the list of options.

3. Then select Note under the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Record Types field.

4. Next, you will need to map the UID column to the Regarding (lookup) field on the Note record.

5. Select which entity you want to market to (Contact, Account, or Lead).

6. After selecting the entity you want to market to, click on the Looking Glass icon next to the entity.

From here you can select which field on a record will be used to find the records you need. You can select any field and it does not need to be configured as a quick find field. You can also select multiple fields if the column has different UIDs per record.

7. After the import, you can easily create a marketing list and use Advanced Find to add the desired contacts.

A simple Advanced Find allows you to locate the records related to the Note that was imported.

Another option for finding records from an external list in CRM is to add a semi colon after the UID and paste a single text string into the record’s lookup field in Advanced Find. For this option, the field that is being searched does need to be configured as a quick find field.

In order to get the data into a single string, you will need to

1. Copy the data with semi-colons from Excel

2. Then Paste it into Microsoft Word using the Keep Text Only option to remove the Excel source formatting.

3. Then use the Replace feature in Word to remove the paragraph formatting that remains.

4. Resulting test string can be pasted into the CRM Look up field!

After pasting the data into the lookup field it will find the records that match the UIDs. This approach works well for finding records 250 or less. How long it takes will depend on how many records you are looking for.

Marketing lists are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to utilizing CRM’s marketing features for your business. Whether you’re managing your brand, running lead nurturing campaigns for demand generation or tapping into advanced digital marketing strategies, PowerObjects Marketing Solutions can help you take your organization to the next level of marketing!

Thanks for stopping by our blog today! Happy CRM’ing!