Hi Community,
We are currently in the process of cleaning up/reducing the number of contacts that we hold in our Dynamic365 CRM and we have noticed that the team have been duplicating a 'quick create contact cards' so that they can allocate the contact to a number of different Marketing Lists.
For example, if a certain contact falls under 5 marketing categories, we will create this contact 5 times and change the Business Sector field to show the five different Marketing Campaigns.
Clearly, this process is incorrect (I hope) as we have MANY duplicate contact cards.
Is there a workflow/process/entity or field that can be built to allocate one contact to many marketing Campaigns?
If so, can you please confirm in a step by step guide?
Any information/help you can provide would be highly appreciated.
Many thanks,
Emma
Hello,
If I understand correctly is your process to create duplicate contacts in order to allow assignments to your Business Sector field which might probably is of type option set. This does not sound like the best design.
You could look at different approaches to clean up your data and find a better design.
Option 1: Create a separate object for your Business Sector and build a 1:N relationship that can associate contacts under Business Sectors. On each contact you will then find a grid of Business Sector which the contact is attached to. This pattern is great if you need to maintain more information under your Business Sector entity.
You would also build dynamic marketing lists for each Business Sector that select the relevant contacts. You can distribute campaigns against such lists. You will also be able to build marketing segments, if you are using as well Dynamics 365 for Marketing to drive your marketing automation in that app.
Option 2: Use a multi select option field type defined within the contact or on global level for your Business Sectors. Now each contact can be associated to one or more sectors by setting the respective multi choice options.
Again you would also build dynamic marketing lists for each Business Sector that select the relevant contacts. You can distribute campaigns against such lists. You will also be able to build marketing segments, if you are using as well Dynamics 365 for Marketing to drive your marketing automation in that app.
Option 3: The lightest option would be to simply create static marketing lists, one for each Business Sector and add the respective contacts to those lists.
You can distribute campaigns against directly against those lists. You will also be able to build marketing segments that load contacts from those lists, if you are using as well Dynamics 365 for Marketing to drive your marketing automation in that app.
But the last option is the most fragile one, because modification of the lists are easily made and you would use your Business Sector association.
Best end to end approach would perhaps be:
Use Option 3, just as a starting point when you identify the contacts per Business Sector and deduplicate contacts. Then you can start from these lists do update all respectively contained contacts for Option 1 or Option 2.
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