Contact Data Import/Export

There are multiple ways to import and export data in the Market2Lead system. Contact data Imports and exports can be performed directly to or from a file on the network or over FTP, and they can be immediate, or they can be scheduled for a future time.

• FTP/SFTP imports and exports of CSV files
• Direct imports and exports of CSV files

Direct and FTP/SFTP Imports

Market2Lead provides the functionality to import contacts from CSV (comma-separated value) formatted files directly or via FTP. CSV files can be generated by any standard office application such as Microsoft Excel. For multi-byte data such as Japanese or Chinese, the file has to be encoded in UTF-8 format.

Poorly executed imports can degrade the quality of a CRM database. This is why Market2Lead has invested heavily in ensuring that imports guard against poor data. The import wizard provides the following functionality and user guidance to protect database quality:

• Use default de-duplication rules or custom rules for each import
• Check each field’s data type to ensure a match: date, string, email, Boolean and number formats
• Check that import values fall within the specified picklist of values when appropriate
• Rejection of specific contact records that do not meet required standards
• Merge rules for adding new data to existing contacts

Import configurations can be saved in a folder for future re-use if you frequently import data from the same source. In the case of recurring FTP/SFTP imports the same configuration file is reused each time it is scheduled to run.

Direct and FTP/SFTP Exports

There are numerous ways to export contact records throughout the application:

• The list segmentation functionality enables export of any list, with any number of fields, to a CSV
• The import status file enables export of just those contacts whose import failed so that the data can be corrected and the import tried again
• Many operational reports include data on individual contacts
• Queues can be created to export contact data as a periodically emailed CSV file
• Queues can be created to export contact data as a periodically FTP/SFTP transferred CSV file

The Import/Export functionality is geared towards getting data into and out of the system easily, but with high data quality results.