Exporting Account / Contact data for external e-marketing mailshots in Microsoft CRM

Most marketing departments perform some level of e-marketing email campaigns to try and boost lead levels. There are many companies that provide online portals for you to perform these email campaigns such as Purestone and Communigator.

Typically you would upload a .csv list of target email addresses and other information such as Firstname, Surname, Job Title and Company. Then create the email template to send in both Plain Text and also HTML versions. This template would most likely include a link or links to landing pad web pages on your website.

The portals provide tools for analysing the campaign results. They track email opens, click throughs to the landing pages, replies as well as bounces and unsubscribes.

The question is, how do you get this information back into Microsoft CRM?

Exporting data from CRM using the front-end to an external source is always going to be problematic when you want to re-import the data. You never can be 100% sure that the right record will be updated.

The is a solution however (there are probably lots of other but this is the one I use).

1. Create a Marketing List in CRM with you targets on.
2. Run a SQL query on SQL Server Management Studio to return the fields you want from the Marketing List: not only FirstName, Surname, EmailAddress etc but also return the GUID - the unique identifier of the record.
3. Run your campaign on the portal ensuring that the GUID is a field in your .csv.
4. Re-import the results back into MS CRM using a tool such as ImportManager from CRM Extensions. This tool allows you to Import Records using the GUID! - CRMs tools do not allow you to this.

Now you can 100% accurate with your re-importing!