Too much of anything, even a good thing, can lead to problems. So it is with the popular use of SPAM email and mass faxing.

With anti-spam blocking and FCC banning unsolicited faxes, what are businesses to do? To begin with, careful attention to documenting and honoring opt-in and requests for removal/opt-out. Then make sure selective before any broadcast transmissions in order to ensure we do not violate the wishes of our consumers, let alone the laws which may subject us to costly fines.

GoldMine has several features that aid one with managing email and fax distribution lists including but not limited to:

· Drill down option with filters to limit records that have opted in/out
· Merge codes to identify at the contact level for both print and email
· Fields to designate multiple other criteria which is the basis for including or excluding records

(If handling email “removal requests” automatically is your goal, check out BounceLinker. This powerful GoldMine add-on is a must for any GoldMine user that does volume email marketing. In addition to handling “removals”, it can also identify records with undeliverable emails, and even attach automated processes in the event of a duplicate or removal request.)

Ok, you have your GoldMine installed and you want to add a user.  You open up the User Settings and click ‘New’.  You fill in the desired username, full name and the password.  You also see this curious checkbox with the word ‘Master Rights’.  You are not exactly sure what this means, but you’ve heard somewhere it has to do with administering GoldMine.  What you have heard is true, but there are many more truths in life and it is these other truths that can hurt you.

Within GoldMine there is something called a Master Rights account.  This account is similar to the administrative user account in Windows NT, 2000, and XP Pro.  With Novell, it is the Supervisor account and in Linux it is the Root account.  Users that have been granted the rights these accounts carry become ‘all powerful’.  They can also become ‘all dangerous’.  The choice to grant master rights to your GoldMine users is not something to be taken lightly.

GoldMine master users are permitted access to all portions of GoldMine and can bypass any security features.  The only areas of GoldMine a master rights user cannot venture are the Personal Base of the InfoCenter and the Personal Rolodex of other users.  Everything else is wide open.  It is for this reason you should have no more master rights users within the organization than is absolutely necessary, and those that do have these rights should be clearly defined as users that genuinely need total access to GoldMine.

Master Rights Do’s:

• Do give at least one user master rights.  You need this to add users and do system administration.
• Do give master rights to ONLY those users that have a genuine need.
• Do change the passwords of master rights users frequently.
• Do change the default Master account password after GoldMine is installed.  Better yet, create a new master account under a different username and remove the original ‘MASTER’ account.

Master Rights Don’ts:

• Don’t give master rights to a user just because they are ‘the boss’.  This one can be tough to avoid, but try for the sake of your sanity.
• If you are undocking licenses for installations on remote machines, don’t undock all the user accounts available unless at least one has been granted master rights.
• Don’t give out master rights user passwords to non-master rights users.

Used wisely, GoldMine’s Master Rights can be a wonderful thing and can reduce the workload of administrators by spreading the administrative load.  Used unwisely, these rights can become one of the worst administrative nightmares you will ever encounter.

This article begins with the premise that you already know what GoldMine Automated Processes (AP) are.  What you may not recognize is that one of most important GoldMine Automated Process may be the one that decides which other Automated Processes should be assigned to a record(s). Automated Processes (AP) can do a whole host of functions.  But one of the coolest things they can do is attach another Automated Process (Track). 

This allows a marketing or sales department to design an AP that can determined, based on a wide variety of “triggers,” such as field entries (dbase conditions), completed or pending activity, elapsed days or other criteria, which AP(s) need to be assigned in order to perform other functions.  The possibilities are so vast, that one can always find new ways to take advantage of this capability.  Here are but few examples to illustrate the idea:

Example #1:  If a new prospect record is added to the database with important information missing, the AP could attach a different “missing information” AP that is specifically designed to identify which fields are missing and send an email to the contact requesting that information, or schedule a follow-up action for someone inside the organization to get that information.

Example #2:  In the event of a sale, the same AP that decided to attach the “missing information” AP, could also have attached a “new customer”AP.  This AP might automatically send out a thank you note to the customer and alert customer service of a new account.

Example #3:  Leads entered into GoldMine using the Web-import capabilities can automatically have a “web import” process attached.  This process can look at the information your customer requested, based on a field they checked off, and automatically attach the appropriate “product or service AP,” specifically designed to send the prospect suitable information and schedule a follow-up activity for that assigned sales representative.

The hardest part about Automated Processes is thinking them through and designing them to be constructive, rather than counterproductive.  Anticipating and accounting for all potential scenarios requires a lot of thought.  By the same token, given all the time AP’s can save an organization, as well as how they can improve sales and service for prospects and customers, Automated Processes are well worth the effort.

What we sometimes take for granted as salespeople can dampen marketing effectiveness. A lack of record details can mean the difference between one prospect being sent a campaign and another being overlooked.

Marketing and sales should be a symbiotic relationship. An action in one area supports and compliments an action in another area. Mutual understanding and respect is vital.

Marketing professionals don’t look at data in the same way as salespeople. Salespeople can look at a poorly completed/updated record in GoldMine, with cryptic sales notes, which trigger recent memories, and then know how to act and/or respond appropriately. Marketing works with aggregate data – segmenting and reporting on it based on the details in the record.

For example, if a campaign is being targeted based on contact titles, and sales reps don’t gather or properly format the titles faithfully, a large percentage of targets may be overlooked by the campaign. Thereby killing opportunities before they even had a chance!

A marketing rule of thumb is that the quality of the list accounts for 40% of a campaigns success (the “offer” 40% and the “creative” 20%). It is also a marketing axiom that your in-house database of contacts is your most valuable list, and one of a business’s most valuable assets! Enhancing and getting the value of that list is what sales and marketing strategies strive to do.

Begin by defining the “must get” fields and reinforce accuracy. Salespeople must be accountable for missing information that is critical marketing. Your Solution Partner can show you many ways to improve list quality with GoldMine, including but not limited to:

· AutoUpdate Expressions
· Field Set-up Properties
· Automated Processes that Trigger based on dbase conditions

Your list is valuable, and so are the potential business opportunities that it represents. Focusing attention on improving the quality and usage of your GoldMine database can be a profitable resolution for 2003!

When building and managing Groups in GoldMine, you can opt to have any Contact1 or Contact2 field displayed in the “Reference” column of the Group. Often this data can be helpful to view data from the record when viewing and working with Group Membership.

To populate the Reference column with field data, you use an expression when building or sorting the Group. For example, if you want to see the record’s city, use the expression {contact1->city}. To display a different Primary field (top half of the screen) just substitute that field name. To use fields from the Summary or Fields tab, change the expression to {contact2->db field} and enter the exact database field name, not the label.

Another point about Groups, Sorting members can be very useful when working with Groups. You can sort the list by any Contact1 or Contact2 field. Keep in mind that the Sort field is limited to the first eight characters. Once you sort the membership, the “Find” box corresponds to the values in the “Sort” column.

I don’t suppose your prospects generally take the time to tell you that your decision maker has left their company and to please redirect all future sales and marketing communications to the new person who has replaced them. (Yeah right!) Maybe your customers even forget to do this.

Suppose there was a free service that automatically gives you a list of every one of your business contacts that is no longer with the firm you knew them to be with. Wouldn’t this be handy!

People move on. And in business it’s over 30% annually. With a long sales cycle, as well as the fact that some companies may not be in the market one year and then be serious buyers the next, staying in touch for the long haul is critical to the success of marketing and sales. Furthermore, relationships with current customers can hinge on the relationship you have with one person. If they go, you now have to start building a new relationship with someone who may be predisposed to taking your account elsewhere. Suffice to say that it is essential to know when your “contacts” move on!

Email is one cost effective strategy for identifying key contacts who may have moved on. Undeliverable email will automatically bounce back to the sender. And, unlike the postal service that charges for address change notification, this way is free! Besides, with B-to-B address change notification through the Post Office is only effective for telling you that the firm has relocated. It’s not effective for personnel changes. What you need to do is email.

If you do a broadcast email, within 24 hours you’ve received notifications of not only bad addresses, but also for folks who are no longer with the company.

Using GoldMine’s email rules, you can automatically file all those bad emails into an “undeliverable folder.” By looking up email addresses (Lookup Menu > Details > email Address) or using eGrabber you can easily identify the records in GoldMine that you need to follow up and identify a replacement for, or at least a corrected email.

With this strategy in mind, “Return to Sender” takes on a new meaning and a new value!

Whether you have a big or small marketing budget…sometimes less is more. Here’s what I mean.

Short, simple text-only communications to prospects and customers can be just as effective as expensive fancy marketing pieces. In fact, they can even be better. Consider these four drawbacks to more elaborate campaigns.

1. Today, the attention span of consumers is nearly nonexistent. The longer the message, the more appealing it needs be in order to pull the reader in.
2. It’s difficult and expensive to produce an impressive or attractive marketing piece. Besides, with consumer expectations as high as they are, a campaign is more likely to fall short of any powerful or lasting impression anyway.  

3. In the time it takes to conceive, plan, develop, and produce even a modest quality campaign, the marketing opportunity can pass you by.  

4. The instincts of the consumer recognize any mass produced campaign piece as being just that, mass marketing, rather than a personal communication. In other words, consumers don’t feel as though there is a real person on the sending end. Therefore, the affects of personalization are diminished. The recipient feels no sense of obligation to respond.

Consider the alterative classic guerilla marketing strategy. Quickie emails, letters and faxes. Good news for GoldMine users who already have the perfect tool for executing such campaigns.

The trick is to think of a compelling message and then create a highly personalized, extremely brief communication with one main key point and a clear call to action. I’m talking about a few sentences in an email. Or, two or three short paragraphs in a fax or letter. Nothing fancy – no big words, no strong graphics (a logo, maybe)! Use simple, sincere wording, phrased as though it was written by the sender to one person and one person only. This is the kind of marketing campaign that would not even be suspected as being a marketing campaign. Yet, it is a campaign with these major marketing advantages:

• It’s easy and inexpensive to produce
• It can go to market in hours, much less days
• It works as effectively for ten as it does for a thousand
• The feel is personal by its very nature
• What you send gets read!!!

Since it is so easy to tweak the message, you can even target your campaigns based on details you have in GoldMine about your subject audience. So, less is more. And, since it’s less expensive, your ROI should be more too!

Here is a tip to help you deal with the large volume of “non-deliverable email” one gets back as a result of doing a broadcast email with GoldMine. Rather than dealing with the returned (failed) email messages in your email center inbox, create an email rule that automatically files these emails into a special folder to be handled when you see fit.

Simply create a new rule for incoming messages that identifies emails with a subject that contains the various possible scenarios for undeliverable email. (There’s quite a few, and new ones are continually being added.) As the rule’s action, have it file the email to a special folder you’ve created beforehand for undeliverable mail. Remember to activate your rule just before doing a broadcast.

Also, don’t forget to deactivate it a day or two after your broadcast. When you’ve got the time to clean up all those bad email addresses, go into the folder containing all your undeliverable email. To find the corresponding records in GoldMine, just lookup based on “details” for “email address” and type in the email address contained in returned message.

Bonus Benefit – Doing broadcast emails and going through your non-deliverables is a great way to learn about changes in prospect and customer records. With such a large percentage of turnovers in companies, keeping up with non-deliverable email is an effective tactic for alerting you of personnel changes so you can keep your database up-to-date.

  Before anyone started using the term CRM, direct marketers were using databases. And, while CRM is the latest buzz, direct marketing gurus have been telling marketers about database fundamentals before Elan Susser (inventor of GoldMine) wrote his first line of code. The fundamentals are still relevant. Fortunately, however, GoldMine makes it a heck of a lot easier to practice them.

On the other hand, just because we have a powerful tool in GoldMine, doesn’t mean we’re doing what we need to in order to maintain, enhance and use our database. Here are a few database fundamentals and the features in GoldMine that give you better ability to adhere to them:

Ultimately the most fundamental aspect of maintaining a good database depends on the users of it. The real moment of truth that will most greatly affect the quality of your database is every time one of your sales reps or telemarketers or administrators is entering contact information. Your CRM system is not going to spell check a name or address or phone number.

Assuming your “house file” of prospects and customers is one of your organization’s most valuable assets, are you treating it as such? Who in your organization is responsible for seeing to it that you’re doing what should be done in order to maintain, enhance and use your database?

Being a better marketer is a lot easier with GoldMine. And, while GoldMine can’t turn you into a marketing genius, it sure can help you to work like one!

Not too long ago faxes would be announced each time one was received. Nowadays, as email inboxes and snail-mail boxes get bloated, targeted broadcast faxing is still a medium that reaches decision makers with a hard-copy printed page. Unlike email that is often deleted based on the subject alone before it’s even viewed, faxes deliver a complete message with graphics. This helps them get attention.

While CRM solutions gain greater adoption, most organizations are still just catching on to the potential that a fax server offers. That’s going to change, especially as the technology’s integration with CRM matures, and as the software offers more robust features.

Using Internet faxing with OmniRush (formerly FaxRush), you can reach contacts for $.09 a page, far less than the cost of even, “bulk” direct mail. Internet faxing doesn’t rely on a modem or tie up phone lines to transmit; it goes out over the Internet and rings at the receiver’s fax machine like an ordinary fax. The volume is virtually unlimited.

With OmniRush, faxes can be merged like MS Word documents during the broadcast process so each fax is personalized. Adding a fax-back form to the document makes it easy for recipients to respond. Always offer an “opt out option” in at least 9-point size font.

Fax numbers tend to be more readily available than email addresses. It’s an especially viable communication medium for B-to-B marketers. Integrated with your other communication channels, it can build business and reinforce current customer relationships.