Question

Importing Person Updates to Existing Record

  • 17 March 2022
  • 5 replies
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Userlevel 2

Hi There,

We use mailchimp for our email marketing and we often hold webinars and registration type of events.  That data sits in Mailchimp with tags.   I don’t know of a way to import tags from Mailchimp (tried Outfunnel and it only imports from Copper to MC) so I tried to import a CSV matching to the copper email and the new tag.  I only had 2 columns, email and tag.

Thank god for the revert option.  I imported the record with the tag but it cleared the names with email prefixes and reverted the contact type to uncategorized!!

Is there a safe way to do this?

I followed the instructions to the letter.  Nowhere did it caution you that by importing without all the existing info from Copper, that the new import with overwrite and wipe out data.   I chose match to email and update.


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5 replies

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Hi @Tammymiles, thanks for posting!

You mentioned your spreadsheet looked something like this:

email tag
michelle@copper.com community newsletter
kevin@copper.com community newsletter

 

Those emails in the spreadsheet - were they already associated with Copper contacts prior to your import?

The reason I ask is because of the way our importing tool works. If you use Manage Matching Records with the Overwrite option, it will update your existing contacts. But if your spreadsheet has an email address that does not exist in Copper already, it will create that contact for you. But your spreadsheet doesn’t contact a lot of the info you’d normally use to create a contact (e.g. Name, Contact Type). So you’ll end up with contacts with incomplete information.

If those emails/contacts did exist in Copper already, then it should only overwrite the fields you’re importing (i.e. Tags, in your case). It should not wipe out existing information unless you have a spreadsheet column for it. If that’s the case then we’d want to dig deeper.

Anyways, let me know if those emails were already in Copper. Thanks Tammy!

Userlevel 2

Hi Michelle,

 

Yes, these contacts had existing records!

I could see activity data when I noticed the issue and then reverted.

When you say overwrite tags - does that mean it will erase existing tags?  We don’t want that either - we want to “add” tags to existing records.

We really need a solution for this to create much needed marketing to sales reports.

 

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Following

 

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Hey @Tammymiles,
 

When you say overwrite tags - does that mean it will erase existing tags?  We don’t want that either - we want to “add” tags to existing records.


It won’t erase existing tags, it will overwrite them.

If you have the following tags:

  1. Tag A
  2. Tag B​​​​​

And you want to add Tag C and D to that, you will have to include Tag A and Tag B in your import,

So what you end up importing should look like this if you want to keep Tags A/B as well:

  1. Tag A
  2. Tag B
  3. Tag C
  4. Tag D

If you just end up importing JUST Tag C and D, your tags will end up looking like:

  1. Tag C
  2. Tag D

You can find this information (and more) in article: Update Records On Import


Another useful article that has to do with imports: How to update on import (aka manage matching records)

 

Hope that helps, otherwise please let me know if you have any additional questions regarding this!

Best,

Userlevel 1

@Ashar from Copper @Michelle from Copper I’ll be working on an record update import this week and want to make sure I avoid what @Tammymiles ran into! If I want to update existing Opportunity records and leave columns in my .csv for ONLY the fields I want to update, fields not included in my sheet will stay untouched, correct?  To make sure I understand, if I had columns for all fields on the opportunity and left many blank, those that were left blank would be overwritten as blank, correct?  Thanks so much for the clarification!