One of the main features that separates Retirement Plan Prospector and the American Directory of Group Insurance from basic 5500 lookup tools like FreeERISA and DOL’s E-FAST is the ability to create lists and export them to an Excel spreadsheet/ CSV format. This article will show you how to use the various features of the export feature in order to create spreadsheets for Mail Merge campaigns, Salesforce exports and more.
Setting Up Your Export
First, you’ll need to set up your export by performing a search to narrow down your results. If you don’t have any search filters set up and you go to export, you’ll be prompted to return to the Advanced Search page and set up filters before you can advance. The export limit for each account is 10,000 records per export, so make sure to limit your list to get under that 10,000 record limit. If your search has over 10,000 records, you can try adding more filters to get your list under 10,000. Some examples of filters you can add are: searching by a more restrictive geographic area like a smaller zip code radius, searching by specific plan types, or searching by plans with a range of participants.
Choosing Which Export to Use
After you’ve set up your search to capture the data you want to use, it’s time to pick your export format. We have a number of different options available for you to choose from, including Mailing List, Salesforce Friendly and Complete Dataset formats. Which export you’ll want to use depends on your use case. If you’re looking to set up a mailing campaign, you’ll probably want to use the Mailing List export to get all the information like address and contact information you’ll need to set up the campaign. If you’re looking to save new leads to your CRM, we have the Salesforce Friendly export that is automatically formatted to work perfectly with Salesforce.com and can be configured to work with other CRM as well.
Custom Exports
Don’t see the right format in our prepared list of export formats? You can create your own custom export based on the information you want to see in your export. You can use one of our premade export formats as a base to get started or you can just choose the fields you want to include in your custom export one by one from a list. Once you’ve chosen those fields you want to export, you’ll save your export under a specific name so you can reuse it whenever you want. Your custom export will show up under the Standard Layout section on the Export page and you can run your custom export from there.
Running The Export
Once you’ve created your list and chosen your export layout, you’ll need to pick the file format. For our Standard Layouts, you’re able to export by Excel or CSV file format, and you can export by unique sponsors (shows one plan per sponsor) or every plan that shows up in your inital search. Once you’ve picked the format, click the link and your export will start. You can look at the bottom of the page for updates on the progress of the export. You’ll be notified of a completed export in two ways: you should see an exclamation point pop up on the Export tab in the database itself, and you’ll receive an email notifying you of your export’s completion.
