Steps for migrating people from a standalone email blasting tool to Salesforce.com and What Counts
I recently moved a group from an email blasting tool to sf.com integrated with What Counts and took notes. I don’t know if anyone is interested, but here are the steps required:
- Generate list of all subscribers and the lists they are subscribed to from the old system
- email address
- first name
- last name
- Use DemandTools Find Contact ID’s for known email addresses
- exact match on email address
- Update found Contacts with email subscription information
- Mark a checkbox for the newsletter in question
- Load all people without direct matches in Contacts as Leads
- Process them with the Lead Converter to do matching and create Households and Accounts
- Add people who didn’t have names in the old system directly to What Counts
- They will get mailings, but won’t be synched with Salesforce.com
- Set up What Counts to talk to Salesforce.com
- Create an integration profile (username and password)
- Tell What Counts which Contacts should be on each list
- Schedule those pulls to run nightly
- Tell What Counts what to do in Salesforce.com when a person unsubscribes from a list
- Set up the Web To Lead for form getting new subscribers into Salesforce.com
- Test
- Web To Lead
- Lead Conversion
- What Counts pull
- Unsubscribe
And just like that, you’re done!
March 9th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Hey Steve,
Thanks for the blow-by-blow account. I’m curious on your assessment of What Counts vs. VerticalResponse or other Appexchange-listed email marketing systems. Care to comment? I see from their site that they’ve got quite the array of integration options, and from a functionality perspective seem to have nice features that you don’t typically get in ‘basic’ email marketing tools (e.g. single list / global opt-out).
Cheers,
Rem
March 9th, 2007 at 8:27 am
What Counts is full featured, and as always, it’s harder to make a full featured app easy to use. Nice things about What Counts is that you can control multiple lists and automatically manage subscribes and unsubscribes from them. One thing that’s missing is integration with Campaigns–you can only pull Contacts, Leads, or Accounts to a list based on fields on those objects. The other drawback about What Counts is that they don’t see the Salesforce.com integration as a strategic product, so it’s not moving forward as rapidly as the rest of their product.
The folks at What Counts are great to work with. They’ve been to Web of Change a couple times and have great values. I’ve told them about the value of Campaign integration, and they’ve expressed interest in building that into their integration. We’ll see if it happens.