The Guide: How to Sync your CRM Contacts into your Email Marketing Platform
So, your company uses a CRM platform that, while it may have all the bells and whistles for your sales team, does not have any built-in features that sync your Contact data with your email marketing tool.
It’s a common problem. Many of us are using two (or more!) tools that, while they work great on their own, were chosen without foresight into how they can play nice together.
What we’re left with…
A need for a simple and consistent method to get our Contact data from our CRM into our email platform on a regular basis.
Why?
Because all of those newly entered Contacts that we worked so diligently to enter — these are our shiny and new audience members! These are the key stakeholders, the movers and shakers that you and I decided were worth documenting as potential leads and resources. Don’t you think they are worth getting your message out to?
Even more importantly, those Contacts that we just added — from our meetings, phone calls, presentations, or card swaps at a cocktail hour — they are already engaged with our team and business (unless you stole their information…but don’t do that). This makes them the most active, relevant audience we have.
Ok, ok…so what do we do?
We use Pipedrive and Constant Contact over here, but the method applies to any set of data tools.
First, we know that our email outreach efforts are done about once a month. So, we want to create a schedule for our data pulls to be completed every week. This is to make sure that we are always catching our recently added Pipedrive People and adding them to every possible email campaign. If you send out emails more often, make sure you complete these steps more frequently!
Next, we want to pull the list of People added in the last month who have an email address:
We can do this easily using a pre-configured template from the Import2 Express Report Library. You can also use Pipedrive’s lists and export feature to do this, if you are so inclined.
FYI: Make sure you include custom fields in your file if you use these to track helpful Contact data like location, which Products they use, and their email communication preferences. (Import2 Express report templates include these for you by default). This will ensure that you are:
- Only adding People who have given permission for you to email them
- Adding these People to the right email lists based on their Product preferences, geographic market or other key segmentation that you track
If you use Import2 Express, you can add your scheduling preference right then and there so you never have to think about this again. Go a step further and add share this report with your team so that they will receive the report each month when it is ready!
Let’s stop here a second and emphasize this point…
Avoid the temptation of exporting your entire list of People emails to upload from scratch each time you want to update Constant Contact. This may seem easy and a sure-fire way to make sure all emails are updated if you lose track of your update schedule (don’t be this guy) BUT this will overwrite the critical data that our marketing teams use to track subscriber activity.
If you overwrite the email list instead of just adding the new guys, you lose visibility into your subscriber activity stats, the unsubscribes, the cleaned emails from Constant Contact’s validation features and more. This is actually the information that our marketing team’s can use to give back relevant information to us folks on the sales team so that we can follow up with new leads!
Now that you have your list of new emails, all that’s left is to use your email platform’s native import feature to upload these People into the system and start emailing!
Make sure to pay close attention to the validation steps during the upload process, so you can catch any potential duplicates from your list of Pipedrive People before they end up on your email lists.
There you have it. You’re the man with a plan. Put your feet up and relax, knowing that you just made your marketing team happy, with very little effort! No more tedious processes!
