Hello Higher Ed friends. How are you solving for Ad-hoc Contact Lists in your Marketing Cloud instance?
Our scenario is that a department using Marketing Cloud has a "random" list of Contacts they need to email; maybe for an event or promotion. These Contacts are not Student or Faculty, so for us they would not already be in Salesforce/MC. They could be in Salesforce if we've created them for a previous business process (parents, previous event attendee, campus partner) but, most likely they are not.
Our question is if we would take the time to create these Contacts in Salesforce, or just import them directly into a Marketing Cloud Data Extension.
Pro and Cons go both ways:
• If we import into Salesforce that takes time and we're not putting quality data into the CRM (often these lists just come with email addresses, and sometimes first name, last name). But then we get a ContactID for them and can report on email sends with Salesforce.
• If we put them directly into MC and bypass Salesforce, we're creating MC records where the Key is an email address and not a ContactID. Not ideal since the rest of our MC records will have Key = ContactID
How are you handling a similar scenario with your Marketing Cloud instances?
99% of the time we have our contacts be in Salesforce and sync over to MC that way. We have made the rare exception once or twice, but we always clean that up afterward. Our approach is driven partially by the desire to use Salesforce for any and all contacts, even if we have minimal information at the start, and partially by a desire to keep our number of contacts in MC controlled/understood. For us, we would get ourselves into trouble if we import directly into MC too much and start having problems knowing how many contacts are from SF and how many are direct imports we've done over time. I guess a third thought is, typically no list of totally external recipients that we have is just for one time use only (it would probably be a newsletter or a regular event or something), so we don't want to create them in MC, then at some point have someone else at the university interact with them and create them in SF, and then have the sync result in a duplicate record for them on the Marketing Cloud side where they potentially start getting two copies of emails. So by funneling through SF it can definitely impact timeline on getting the extension ready for sending, but we see it as worth it in the long run from a duplicate prevention standpoint.
Not sure if that made sense or if I was rambling too much! But long story short, even with minimal data, we always try to create the contacts in Salesforce first to use it as our source of truth for email audiences in MC.
