Most professional service firms utilize the internet, their website, and email, to transfer firm knowledge, automate processes, and as a notification of new services and solutions. It is a very effective way to communicate with existing clients and prospects.

However, for any of these goals to succeed, the information in InterAction must be made available to our website, external database, and email database, (or any other system that actually performs the communication with the recipients) to deliver precise content. Accurate and up-to-date intelligence of needs and opportunities, needs to come directly from InterAction to ensure that clients and prospects aren’t receiving obsolete data.

For professional service firms, we all know that every client and every lead counts.

It makes it imperative that our systems in direct contact with our clients and prospects are based on current data.

Consider this example. We need to send out a recently published whitepaper. The whitepaper is to be sent to all parties that we think would be interested, based on a survey we conducted to existing clients in the previous month. The current contact data needs to be uploaded to our outsourced Email Service Provider (ESP) in XML, so it can be easily integrated into the email database. From there, the email list will be built on the data and sent out. How do we do it?

If your firm has not developed a system that automates the transfer of current contact data to the email database (which they should certainly consider doing!), then we will need to export the data manually from the InterAction Windows Client.

Step 1: Query the Data to Export

We need to query the group of clients that we are going to be sending the whitepaper to. In my example, our clients were placed into the Opportunities module based on solutions we felt would help them. To determine the recipients of the whitepaper, we simply did a query by the opportunity that would benefit from the whitepaper:

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Step 2: Verify Who Will Be Exported

After querying the contacts, a list will appear of all the contacts, including companies and people. However, what if we only want the email to go to the key decision maker at each company? To further verify who will be exported and receive the whitepaper, we need to mark which contacts we want. As you see below, you will need to mark the check box of all the decision makers that we want to include.

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Step 3: Organize the Fields and Format to Export

Now, lets begin the exporting process. Go to Folder > Export. The following screen should appear:

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First, we will need to indicate that we want to export to an “XML Data” format, by using the drop-down menu for File Format. Then, we will need to decide on what data actually needs to be exported to the email database. This will be different for every upload. Make sure the Marketing Department is clear on their instructions of what information needs to be passed on in the export.

By default, InterAction already provides some export templates that they feel will be useful. Hopefully, you can look through them and see if any will match, or can be slightly edited to match, by highlighting the template and clicking ‘Edit’. Otherwise, you will need to create your own instructions by clicking ‘New’, and pulling the fields that are necessary for the campaign (You are probably wishing by now that this was automated!). For my example, the “Fax Export” template is a perfect match for the fields that I need.

Finally, you will need to write the name and destination of the finished XML file that you wish to create, under ‘File Name’.

Step 4: Double-check the Results

Click ‘OK’, and InterAction will do the rest! Once the export is complete, it will ask you if you would like to open the file. Always click ‘Yes’. Its very important for the sake of the data, that you give it an once over, and make sure there weren’t any errors in the process.

From there you are ready to deliver the xml file to the ESP.