[SalesForce] Designing the Data extensions – Exacttarget : pointers needed

We have received a new ET environment for our customer and are starting to use it for marketing campaign . At the moment they will start with exact target Landing pages and the links are posted in the external pages to create a new leads / customers.

I am given a fields (names,company,phone,email,jobtitle,gender,optin,postalcode,city)for those the leads info we receive from landing pages.And was told to design/ create a DE by adding any necessary attribute/field required to it. Its just the starting point and they may have new fields addition in future.I was also told that there may be salesforce integration in future too.

Am just wondering, whats other fields i.e subscriberkey or customer id or sth like primary ids will be required. I worked with ET and CRM and just a little bit of exclusive Exacttarget. But i dont have much experience in it .. Any suggestion. I was given full responsibility on this and unfortunately am the only one in my team who is working or knew little on exacttarget. I really wanted to make it impressive(without having any trouble in future).Coz, last time when i did some small consulting work, we did have trouble with customer id which was 8 digit and was not easy to handle , so wonder like having some concrete primary key …

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Also, wonder i don't see the Data Extension option in the Subscriber Section of the Exacttarget…is it hidden somewhere and have to enable it or do i have to contact Exacttarget support ??

-thx

Best Answer

Last question answered first: if you don't see data extensions in your account, contact support and they will turn it on for you. You are looking in the right place.

Secondly, you have a tremendous amount of flexibility for primary keys in data extensions:

  1. You can make any column you want to be a primary key. So if you make a customer ID column of type text (string) or number or whatever, that's fine.

  2. You can also make composite keys of any number of columns. So, perhaps you want the customer ID column + CreatedDate column to be the primary key. No problem, just mark them both as primary keys, and it will enforce uniqueness for that primary key.

Hope this helps!

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