How to Use a Salesforce Report as an Email List

A Salesforce report is a powerful tool that makes it simple to pull up very specific groups of leads or contacts.  So wouldn't it be great if you could use a Salesforce report (or multiple reports) to build an email list? 

Well, it is great, because you can already use Salesforce Reports to create an email list with VerticalResponse.  It is a simple matter of running a report, adding the members of that report to a campaign and then selecting to use that campaign as a list.

Let's take a detailed look at each of the above steps, so you can start turning your Salesforce Reports into mailing lists today. 

Get started by creating a custom Salesforce report.  If you already know how to do this, you can skim through these instructions for putting together a basic report:

1. Go to Reports.
2. Click Create New Custom Report.
3. Use the provided drop-down menu to “Select the type of data you wish to report on.”  Note that running a report on Leads is a good place to start.  Then click Next.
4. Choose to create a Tabular, Summary or Matrix report.  Tabular is the default and the one you should go with if you have no previous experience with Reports.  Click Next after you make a selection.
5. Select the columns to include in your report.  Your choices here have no impact on what ultimately ends up in your list - you’ll be able to select the columns for your list (like First Name, Last Name, City, Record Owner, etc.) during the list creation process in VerticalResponse.  So you can leave this on the defaults if you want.  When you’re done here, click Next.
6. Select the information to summarize.  Your choices here determine how Salesforce will display the summary information for numerical fields within the Report.  This page isn’t necessary for what we’re trying to do here, so you can ignore it and click Next.
7. Order the report columns.  This determines the order in which columns of data are organized within the Salesforce report.  This has no impact on your VerticalResponse list, so you can ignore this page if you want and click Next.
8. Select your report criteria.  This is where you setup the search parameters to put your report together.  You can search based on pretty much any information in your account to find the people you want to mail.  When you’re done setting up these parameters, click Run Report.
9. Now your report is ready to go.  If everything looks good, you can use the Add to Campaign button at the top of the report to select a report to which you can add these folks.  Once they’re part of the Campaign, you’ll be able to turn that Campaign into a VerticalResponse list.
10. If you need to setup a Campaign for this purpose then save this report for now by clicking the Save As button.  And then move over to the Salesforce Campaigns tab.

Salesforce Campaigns are a useful way to keep track of your various marketing campaigns, but they are not available by default in every edition of Salesforce.  So if you’ve never used them before you’ll need to make sure you have access to them.  Of course Campaigns are also, as we’re seeing here, a good way to turn Salesforce Reports into a VerticalResponse list.  Setting up a Campaign is very simple:

1. Go to Campaigns.
2. Click New.  This opens up the Campaign Edit screen.
3. There are a number of things you can do from the Edit screen, but there are only two things you absolutely must do:
- Give your Campaign a name. 
- Check the Active box (if this box is not checked, then the Campaign will not be visible to your VerticalResponse account)
4. Once you’ve done at least these two things, you can click Save.
5. Your Campaign is now created and will be available when you click the Add to Campaign button in the report you ran earlier.  So now you can go back to Reports, find your saved report (which should be right at the top of the page) and add the members of that report to your Campaign.
6. If you want to use more than one report for your mailing list, then you can add several Reports to the Campaign.

With all that work finished (which doesn’t take very long at all once you’ve done it a few times) you can import the members of the campaign as a VerticalResponse list:

1. Go to VR Email.
2. Click New List.
3. Choose the option to Use a Salesforce.com campaign.
4. Select the Campaign you want to use from the provided list.  If the list is really long you can use the Search box to find your Campaign.  Making a selection will open up the Map Your Fields page.
5. The Map Your Fields page allows you to select which pieces of data from your Lead / Contact records you’d like to pull over into your list.  Use the drop down menus and checkboxes to choose if you’d like to pull over First Names, Last Names or any other Standard, Customer, Owner or Account level field associated with your records.  Any data you include can be used to personalize an email sent out to the list.  Note that Email Address is checked off to be included by default since you can’t send an email to a list that does not include the email addresses for each of your recipients.  Click Next Step when you’re done.
6. Now you’ll see a Summary / Preview of the records that are being pulled into the list.  If everything looks good, continue on to Next Step.
7. Give your list a name and click Create List.  Your list will then be created and ready for you to use with an email.

Any thoughts or questions about these instructions?  Let us know in the comments!

Comments

[Richard Huffaker]

Hi Calista,

It's actually not too different. We log it in all the same places as a list created through a Contact/Lead search (SF Reports, VR Email History, Activity History), plus we log it in the Member Analysis Report for the Campaign you used to build the list.

[Calista Carter]

This is great, but can you also provide details of how Vertical Response logs that an email was sent and statistics when you use a report/campaign to create your email list? This is different than if you create your list from Contacts/Leads, no?
Thanks.