Try, Then Buy, This Software

You can see all the new information the contact has given you, which gave me a really satisfied feeling. In the case above, for instance (Figure 2), I had spelled Jerry Wagner’s name incorrectly, I had his company name wrong, I had an old address for him (not shown), and no cell phone number. By sending him the Keep In Touch e-mail, I got him to key in all the correct data for me, which saved me time. Plus I now have updated information for him.

Requesting updated data on your clients, prospects, vendors, and other contacts is good for business. It shows all these people that you are thinking of them. Invariably, some will e-mail you and tell you how nice it is to hear from you. Moreover, you now have data that will let you conduct e-mail marketing campaigns to those contacts.

You can update all the new data on your contacts in one mouse click or review each of them individually. And you don’t have to worry that updating your contacts will make you lose valuable data. GoodContacts deposits the old data in the “notes” field of each Outlook contact entry.

I sent out my first Keep In Touch mailing to 315 contacts at 9 A.M. on December 12. Seventy-two hours later, I received updated details from 149 of them and they were still trickling in.

I also learned that 61 of those 315 contacts contained bad e-mail addresses. GoodContacts has a service that will try to get a good e-mail address for these people for $5 for each good address obtained. David Caughey, founder and chief operating officer of GoodContacts Inc., says the company will call your contact for you for the $5 fee, assuming you have a phone number for that contact, and get the contact’s current e-mail address. Before trying that, however, GoodContacts will try ReturnPath.com, a Web company that has a database of 11 million pairs of old and new e-mail addresses (available at www.returnpath.com).

With ReturnPath, you register for free under your current e-mail address and input your old e-mail addresses that are stored in a database. When someone with your old e-mail searches for you at ReturnPath, the service will either automatically provide your e-mail address to the requester, or will notify you of the request, which you may approve or decline. The response will depend on the choice you made when you registered at ReturnPath; the company’s privacy policy states it will not divulge your new e-mail address without your permission.

If your only contact information for a prospect or an old friend is a bad e-mail address, it may be worth trying this database yourself and not paying the $5. Alternatively, you can input your bad e-mail addresses yourself in minutes. I tried it with about 10 bad e-mail addresses, however, and had no luck.

In contrast, a very useful feature in GoodContacts is “Build Your Contact List.” The software will examine all the e-mail addresses in your inbox and compare them to the e-mail addresses in your address book. When GoodContacts finds an address in your inbox that is not in your address book, it lists the address in a report. I used that report to send out about 50 Keep In Touch e-mails. Since they were handpicked by me, most of those people responded immediately by sending me their full contact information, which then was automatically imported into my Outlook address book.

GoodContacts offers some other bells and whistles. For a one-time fee of $50, you can upgrade your licenses to a version that lets you put your own banner across your Keep In Touch e-mail so that you can accent it with your logo and corporate colors. In addition, you can back up your contacts to the GoodContacts server in case your computer is stolen or you suffer a disk failure. That feature costs $24.95 a year.

GoodContacts works with Outlook, Outlook Express, ACT! 2000, Peachtree Contact Manager, Microsoft Exchange, or an open database such as Access, SQLServer, or Excel. Even if you are using a different contact manager, such as ProTracker, Junxure, or Junxure-i, you should be able to get the program to work. GoodContacts sells a $400 open database add-on that lets you map your contact database’s fields to GoodContacts. In addition, Ken Golding, the programmer behind Junxure-i, is writing an interface to automatically map to GoodContacts so that Junxure-i users can avoid the $400 database add-on. ProTracker is also considering such an interface.

Collecting Signatures

Speaking of saving time, I’m willing to bet that one of the most underutilized tools in Microsoft Office is Clipboard. Pretty much everyone is familiar with how you can cut and paste text and pictures in Word, Excel, and Outlook. But what people often don’t realize is that you can cut up to a dozen items in separate pieces and then paste them individually; this is a feature that I use quite a bit when I’m putting contacts into my contact manager database.

Many people send e-mails with a “Signature.” If you use Outlook to receive and send e-mail, you can create a signature by pulling down the Tools menu and choosing Options. Then choose Mail Format and you’ll see a button that is called Signature Picker. You can create a new signature that will go out with all your e-mails in seconds. This way, at the bottom of all e-mails you send, you’ll have your name, company name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and other contact information, and you can add your company slogan.

People appreciate getting this information because it makes it easy for them to call you when you send them an e-mail without having to look up your phone number. You can create a second signature, by the way, and easily switch from the primary to the secondary signature from the “Insert” menu of any e-mail you are composing.

With a lot of people now sending e-mails with signatures, Clipboard has another useful function. Clipboard lets you copy the first line of a signature containing someone’s name separately from the second line of someone’s signature containing their street address. Since you are copying the signature in individual pieces, it’s easy to paste it directly into an Outlook contact card. In fact, most signatures now being sent follow the order of fields in an Outlook entry: name, title, company name, address, business phone, and so on, which makes it easier to copy someone’s contact information from an e-mail and paste it in pieces using clipboard into an Outlook contact form.

To start Clipboard, open Word, pull down the “View” menu, and choose “Toolbars.” You’ll see that when you copy a name in a signature in Outlook, the clipboard appears, showing you have one item in the clipboard. Then, if you copy a second item, say, an address, the clipboard toolbar will show that you now have two items clipped. When you then switch to Outlook, you don’t have to type in the contact’s name and address. You can just cut and paste them. When you hover over a clipped item, you can preview the beginning of the text and rest assured you are pasting the right text in the right field.