Is Your Data All Over The Place? Take Control!

With the economy in the dumpster, it's more important than ever to take control of all of your lists. It could be the thing that gets your business through any tough times. Plus, you might miss out on sending email campaigns to certain recipients just because you forgot about them, which means less revenue to you in the long run.

Do you have your lists in more than one of these places?

• VerticalResponse
• ACT, FileMaker, Salesforce or any other contact manager
• QuickBooks or your accounting system
• POS Systems
• Shoeboxes and fishbowls of business cards
• Spreadsheets
• Sign Up Book

If your business requires you to keep separate lists, that's ok, keep them there. It's not optimal, but if it works for your business fine. BUT, once a week, or more often if you choose, make a copy of all of your lists and choose the place that's easiest to access, upload and download your data. If it's ACT or Salesforce, make sure you don't add duplicate records, it could get messy. If it happens to be a spreadsheet, you might consider having customers in one sheet and non customers in another. And if you want to use VerticalResponse, you can do that too. We will de-duplicate on email address so make sure you include those. Any way you choose, make sure you consolidate your lists so you always have one data source to market to.

One more thing, if you've got your lists offline, spend an hour or so a week getting those lists in digital format. Then welcome these new list members with an email. You'll be surprised at how important managing your lists can be to your bottom line.

Comments

[John Corey]

Presently I do not have a need to mail a list of people on a regular basis. At the same time I do have a number of lists which I would like to manage better. The advice above hit home.

I intend to send out mailings in the future but I am not ready to do so now. Does it make any sense to get a pay as you go account to hold the data and have it ready for later? I really do not want to pay a lot for just holding the data. I am more likely to use the lists if it was cleaned up and organized.

Your thoughts?

[Paul Chaney]

That is exactly what I do with our association's list. We get new records from a variety of sources and I've found through trial and error that Vertical Response is a great solution for homogenizing all the data. It's really been a life-saver for me.

[Matthew Hardy]

Great post. With all the real estate vendor hosted solutions available, we see too many real estate agents try something, then something else and on and on without really taking care of their business data. Having one central database that you keep up to date and then export from periodically for use in other systems is the way to go,