Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
If you want to work chances are you’re going to need to contact potential clients and introduce yourself to them. This is true of just about any market you pursue unless your work of mouth advertising has been so successful that you haven’t actually gone out of your way to pursue additional work. Now, although word of mouth advertising is possibly the best form of marketing, following up with old clients and staying in touch with new ones will likely require some sort of address book or database to assemble all of the contact information in one convenient location.
Years ago I got hooked on a product called Now Contact for this purpose and although I’ve tried a number of other products out there, I keep coming back to Now Contact (available for both Mac and Windows platforms) because I really like the ability to customize how you print addresses out in particular the ability to select which label on a sheet you want to start printing on. The ability to start in the middle of a page means that I can run the same label sheet through my printer a bunch of times and keep printing on exactly the label I want to print on which is great.
Of course the concept of building a database of contacts is simple, collect client information and input it into some sort of organizing software that lets you access it when you need it and likely use it for addressing letters and envelopes. The reality of data entry on the other hand isn’t so much fun, but quite often you can get pre-built lists of contacts that can be imported into what ever contact software you choose to use.
Spending a bit of time getting to know the software you’re using is a great idea and most software packages have the ability to include some sort of indexing systems. Either sorting by a ‘keyword’ or perhaps a ‘category’ that is included at the time of data entry. These come in particularly handy when doing mail outs to targeted markets or if there’s the ability to include multiple keywords or categories you’ll be able to have certain contacts included in multiple groups thus making it easy to include one client in various mailings should you choose to do so.
So why is all of this important? Well I mentioned this a bit in last week’s post about sending birthday cards to possible clients. In today’s day and age of e-business, there’s something particularly nice about receiving something via regular postal mail that isn’t a bill. If you take the time to do a mailing to a target market and do so on a regular basis, the spaced repetition of having your face cross potential clients desks will keep you in their mind and although it may be months or even year’s before you get a response from a given mailing, all it takes is one new job and/or one new client to make it all worth while.
I use Daylight for the mac. Switched from Maximizer on the pc.
It was a tough change over, and I’m still not head over heals for Daylight, but I thought it was the only choice I had.
However it does one thing really neat: It will automatically attached / save emails to the client contact (including sent ones) assuming they are already in your database. If not, from the email you can “add to daylight” and it will start the contact with the email and name already in there.
Now, it also syncs with mac’s address book.
So the astute mac user will also know that when you have address “data” in an email, mac can detect it, and if you right click, it gives you the option to “save as a contact”.
So, sometimes, when there is data already typed into an email, I can save it to address book using that method (less typing), and then it will sync it with daylight.
There is also an iphone ap for daylight, which I think might be a bit expense for my taste.
Bob Cates