Smart marketers use the holidays as a chance to reach out to their prospects and reconnect with their customers. What makes the holidays a great time to connect, is that these dates are recognized and celebrated, so you are on familiar ground. Holidays also give you a reason to reach out in a personalized, non-sales way to the people you want to stay in touch with.
The next few weeks, with Thanksgiving (oops, we missed the Canadian Thanksgiving in October), Christmas, Chanukah, and New Year’s, to name a few, are a perfect time to contact the key peole you work with to let them know you are thankful for their business, wish them a safe and happy new year and mention you would like to work with them in the new year. Remember, no hard sell here!
Here are a few quick tips to make sending your greetings a bit easier this season.
- Segment. Ok, you have 15,000 contacts in your database, but you don’t really want to send to everyone, right? Segment your database and then create a group for the contacts you want to include on your list. You could use your ID/Status and look up all Customers, Prospects and Vendors as a example. Or combine a look up of Customers with sale revenue over X. (You do track sales revenue in your database don’t you?) Or maybe you have a “Holiday” field check box that can be updated, check it and that contact is on the list. All this work should be done in your Act! database, not is Excell or Outlook. Why make work for yourself.
- Personalize. The salutation field in Act! is designed for this purpose. If using an email template (more on that later) customize it to include the “Salutation” field. Your message will look much better than a generic “Dear Valued Customer” at the beginning.
- Labels and subjects. If you are mailing your greeting, use the label feature in Act! (File > Print > Labels) and customize the label. hange the font to italics, or change the font to something less formal than Arial. If using email, create an inviting subject like “Holiday wishes from your team at ABC Company.”
- Record it. After the work is done and the message is sent, record a history in Act! that you sent each contact a holiday greeting. OK, you don’t have to do this one at a time. Create a lookup of all the contacts on your list, go to the Contact List view, and hit the CTRL+H keys at the same time. This brings up the Record History box and now record this as Type = Other, Result = Letter Sent, Regarding = Holiday greeting 2011 (or your specific greeting type.)
If you would like any help with getting your holiday greetings out this year, give us a call. We’ll help you get your message out.
PS: If you are planning on emailing your seasonal greetings, it’s not recommended to send hundreds or thousands of emails from your domain. You need a tool that uses white listed servers. An ideal email marketing solution for Act! is Swiftpage, which is built into Act! as Sage Emarketing for Act!. It is an inexpensive and effective marketing tool for your toolkit. We can help you get set up with a free 60-day trail version that will get you through the holidays.
