Best way to maintain client contact details/email addresses and physical address list for small a bu

UberTiger · 4 Oct 2013 at 13:07

Can anyone recommend a good way to digitise and maintain all of the addresses of clients for a small business? For the purpose of personalised marketing mailshots?

I have records for a few hundred people which have all been recorded by hand.

For the email addresses I was thinking it might be best to input them all to a mailchimp account to use for the occasional newsletter. However I'd also like to digitise all the physical addresses we have on file so we can send a change of location letter and then possibly the occasional seasonal snail mail greeting.

Excel seems like the simplest way to do it, but it seems quite basic. Is it a still a good way to keep all this info or is there maybe a better way of maintaining a list like this, like mailchimp does for emails?

Thanks

UberTiger · 4 Oct 2013 at 13:38

Or I guess the Contacts App on Mac could work?

Using a specific group for all the customers?

Then they could be pretty easily mail merged into word or pages.

The only thing is then it would sync every customer and their data with iCloud and therefore the iPhone associated with it, right?

I'm not sure I'd want all the customer details synced to the business owners iPhone for security reasons in case it was stolen...

paradigm · 4 Oct 2013 at 13:45

Could always throw a quick Access database together with a nicely formatted form-based interface for adding, modifying and generating mailshot? Could even generate a web-interface for it from there.

If you have the data in excel already then it's going to be even easier!

If you don't mind the data being held outside the business, then there are plenty of free online based CRM solutions. Or you could download a free CRM package and host it yourself.

UberTiger · 4 Oct 2013 at 19:18

It's been so long since I've used Access I'm wouldn't know where to start. I guess I could re-familiarise myself with it, shouldn't be too hard for a basic task such as this. Hmmm...just realised it's not installed on the Mac laptop of the user I'm working with. I'd have to take all the paper work home and do it on my windows desktop.

All of the data is on hand written notes at the moment, so unfortunately not lucky enough to already have the data in excel already! It's why I would like to do this right, it'll be fair few hours of input.

The names of each client are already a contact on the users iPhone, so adding the address through Mac Contacts might make sense. The phone is passcode locked and remotely erasable through find my iPhone should the worst happen. Plus the iCloud backup would be handy.

In the end I just want to be able to figure out a flexible way to have a copy of all the data for as many potential uses in the future.

I just tested out Mac Contacts, it seems to work quite nicely with Word 2011 for Mac. I can enter the details for every contact and add a keyword in the notes section to differentiate them from personal contacts.

A smart group can then be created by applying a filter to only pull contacts with that keyword. The mail merge can then be applied through word pulling only the contacts from that smart group.

The only thing remaining now I guess is the flexibility of exporting this data and using it in a program like access in the future. I can export the group as a .vcf vCard. I'm guessing this is a pretty flexible format that can be imported to excel or access?

I'm not familiar with any dedicated CRM packages. Do you think the above will work okay or should I just type everything up directly in a spreadsheet?

Caged · 5 Oct 2013 at 15:31

If you're starting fresh with this and it's a Small Business then I personally wouldn't bother with Access since it should have been taken out back a long time ago. I also wouldn't bother with something that lives as a file on a PC. Some sort of web-based CRM package is going to be the way to go for this. Zoho CRM seems reasonably popular but there's tons of them out there.