Forum Discussion
Marketing / Customer Journeys: list building from external sources
Hi all, I've posted this to the regular community forum as well, and there are https://community.dynamics.com/forums/thread/details/?threadid=67846783-e778-ee11-8179-00224827e905, but posting here just in case some smart nonprofit folks have a suggestion for me 🙂
Basically - looking to send a Customer Journeys email to a list of contacts that has been compiled outside of Dynamics. I can get the Contacts into Dynamics without too much of a headache. Where I'm getting stuck is best approach for getting them into an email-able list of some kind.
It appears I'm unable to import relationships between Segment <> Contact (for either Real Time or Outbound); I have a couple of ideas for how to work around this (use Marketing Lists + Segments; use a temporary Contact helper field + Outbound Segment Query) but curious how other folks have solved for this if you're willing to share!
Thank you
Duncan_McGovern Hey Duncan! If you have a list of contacts you want to use in D365 Customer Insights - Journeys, you can just import an Excel file right from Journeys -> Contacts. Check out this documentation for exact instructions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/import-data.
3 Replies
Duncan_McGovern Hey Duncan! If you have a list of contacts you want to use in D365 Customer Insights - Journeys, you can just import an Excel file right from Journeys -> Contacts. Check out this documentation for exact instructions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/import-data.
keep it up
Thanks Robert, I actually found that documentation as well and was able to get it working.
Heads up for anyone else struggling with this, the *other* documentation article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/email-excel does NOT contain any instructions for setting up an alternate key and update/upsert functionality, which is pretty critical.
The only issue I'm still struggling with is whether it's possible to use email address as a primary key; this does exist in the system, but when I try to use it to match/update I just receive duplicate errors. My understanding was that the key should match first, before duplicate rules, but for some reason this isn't working. I have a viable workaround for the moment using an id from an external system, and it's possible the email/alternate key issue is specific to my org's configuration, but would be nice to get this working.
