The Click Import Tool allows you to pull in a list of participants into CRM, create new Contacts for any new participants (based on the email address), add existing and newly created record to a Marketing List, remove them from a Marketing List, generate Event Participations for them, or create Posted Preferences.
The import tool is designed to help speed data entry and is ideal for situations where you collect names and email addresses, such as a sign-in sheet at an in-person event, or a list of registrants sent to you from an external vendor. However, for more complex scenarios such as loading large amounts of data from external systems, you should consider enterprise data migration tools such as SSIS, Scribe or Kingswaysoft which are designed to provide data cleansing, transformation and multi-threading.
When the Import Tool updates a record, this will also trigger Update events for every field in the updated record that already contained a value when the Import Tool ran. For example, if a record has data in 4 fields and the Import Tool is used to update a new 5th field, then an Update event will be triggered for all 5 fields. This is currently the expected behavior.
- Click's CRM
Access the Import Wizard
There are three different ways you can access the Import Wizard to get started.
- Access the Import Wizard from the toolbar in Audience > Marketing Lists or the toolbar in a Marketing List record.
- Access the Import Wizard from the toolbar in Web and Events > Events or the toolbar in an Event record.
- Or navigate to Settings & Support > ClickDimensions Settings > ClickDimensions Imports, create a new Import record, and click ClickDimensions Import within that record.
Click ClickDimensions Import to start the wizard.
NOTE: You may not see this button if your security role does not include the Create Privilege for the ClickDimensions Import record.
Upload your Data
When the wizard loads, you will see the following screen:
Import Template
To begin, first download our import template. Click Download Excel Template, save the file, and fill it out on your computer.
The columns on the Import Template show the fields that can be updated via an Import. It is possible to include custom text fields from Contacts within the Import Template. You can also include Lookup and Option set fields within the Import Template as well. In order to do this, you will need to add new columns to the import template file based on the schema name of the field that you are trying to map to. This can be obtained by checking the field properties for this field and a CRM admin or CRM partner may needed to help find this schema name. For example:
Once you have the schema name, it can be added as an additional column like this:
Note: For out of the box fields where schema names are not applicable you should use the display name. For new fields it should use the schema name.
Handling Specific Fields
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Email Address data is required. Imported records without values in at least one of the Email Address fields will fail. You must include this piece of data in order to successfully import the records.
The import process will check for existing Contacts in your environment based on matching email addresses, with highest priority given to Email Address 1 matches, followed by matches to Email Address 2 and finally Email Address 3. If no matching record is found, a new Contact will be created with the provided information.
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Company Name is a lookup field in CRM. The value you import to this field will need to match the name of an existing Account exactly in order for the field to map properly.
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The Owner field requires the full name and may require additional permissions. You should type the full name of the desired Owner record as it appears in CRM. This user will also be set as the Owner of any created Event Participation records when using the Create Event Participation Records option, so you will need to ensure that these users have the ClickDimensions User security role or another security role that grants Create privileges for the Event Participation entity.
- The Lead Source field will automatically pull in the default and custom values from the Lead Source field. This is based off of the Lead Source field (schema name: leadsourcecode) in CRM. You will not be able to add any new values within the Excel import template itself. If there are any missing options, then please try publishing metadata and then re-download the import template to see if this adds the options.
Note: Please make sure that you remove any hyperlinks from the email addresses in the Email column. Failing to remove these may cause the import to fail due to the formatting caused by the links. To do this, you can highlight your emails in Excel, right-click, and then use the Remove Hyperlink option:
Opt-In Subscription Management
When importing in an Opt-In environment, three additional fields are required for your import to be successful—Subscription - Method of Submission, Subscription Preference, and Subscription - Submitted On (MM/DD/YYYY).
Once your data is ready, upload your completed template and click Next. If the spreadsheet that you selected is empty, upon clicking Next, the import wizard will display an error message to alert you of the issue.
Choose How to Map Your Data
The import tool will check each email address listed in spreadsheet against existing Contacts in the system through a validation that checks the email address field in CRM. If the email address already exists in your system, you can choose whether to pull over the other information listed for that person and overwrite the data already in the Contact record.
Overwrite fields in CRM
This will overwrite all data in the Contact with the data in the uploaded file.
Only fill in blank fields
If data already exists in the Contact record, the system will leave it, but will fill in any blank fields with corresponding data from the uploaded file.
Do not map anything
Don't push any data from the uploaded file into Contacts.
New Records
Choose Contact as the record type for any new records to be created. New records will be created when there are email addresses that don't match any existing records.
Backup Owner
While you can specify an Owner in your uploaded file, it's necessary to specify a backup Owner record just in case we can't find a match between the listed value and your system in the import.
Choose Actions
These actions will be applied to everyone on the uploaded file, regardless of whether they existed in the CRM previously or not.
Create Event Participation Records
Choose an Event in the system and we'll automatically generate an Event Participation record associated to your Event for each person on your uploaded file. You can select multiple Events here.
Add all to Marketing List
Everyone on the uploaded file will be added to these Marketing Lists. Please note that these Marketing Lists will need to be Static. You can select multiple Contact Marketing Lists as well.
Remove all from Marketing List
Everyone on your list will be removed from the following Marketing Lists. You can also choose multiple Contact lists.
Create/Update Current Subscriptions
NOTE: The Create/Update Current Subscriptions option is only available to customers who are are utilizing the Opt-In Subscription Management Method.
Create Posted Preference records for a Subscription List for each member of the Import. Once you check Create/Update Current Subscriptions, you will be prompted to specify the Subscription List for which preferences will be created. Only one Subscription List can be specified per Import, so if you need to upload preferences for multiple Subscription Lists, a separate Import will need to be run for each list.
Any Posted Preferences created via the Click Import Tool will also be recorded in the cloud to manage opt-in and opt-out preferences. This is discussed in more detail here.
Review and Import
Click Next to review all your settings and make sure they're correct. If anything needs to be corrected you can click Previous to go back and fix it.
If you are trying to add or remove members from a Marketing List, but the list is locked, the following error will display to let you know that the list must be unlocked:
For assistance on locked marketing lists, see this help article.
Finally, input an email address so the import can send you a message to let you know if the process finished correctly or if it ran into any errors.
Click Finish when you're ready to proceed and you'll see a confirmation screen. Your import has started and you'll get an email to the specified address once it's been completed.
FAQs
Where can I view import logs?
As part of our ongoing efforts to continue to improve the import tool, logs are no longer created after an import has completed.
| Feature Added: 2023.07 |
| Feature Updated: 2023.07 |
| Click Version Need: Any |