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The Secret:
I learned something that is so fundamental during that interview that will stick with me forever - but it is the #1 reason that people fail when it comes to email marketing. The rule is broken every day by people that you know that send you emails expecting you to buy their product or service. Are you ready for the magic? It’s the subject line. In his words to me that day, “If you are going to send me something and expect me to open it AND read it AND possibly buy your product, if the subject line is not about me, my problems, my issues………then Why in the [fill in the blank] did you send it to me…..I’m probably going to click Unsubscribe and now everything you wanted to send me in the future won’t be received”.

Tying your CRM Package to Your Email Marketing:
We are firm believers that a CRM system tied to your email marketing system is the key to making this happen correctly and help your ‘open and click rates’ to sore. If you sell uniforms to schools and hospitals for example, your monthly newsletter that includes articles for everyone may get opened but won’t have a great response. Your CRM package has fields that identify what type of customer or prospect you are tracking and what they buy from you. An email to a school with the subject line: Fall Hem Length Changes - Do they comply with your policies? - will get opened…..a lot….. if you send it to your contacts from schools, not hospitals. Likewise, an email to a hospital - Fabric Immunology Compliance Study Results - Surgical Clothing Regulations are Changing - will get opened…by hospitals. We use a product called SwiftPage that can be used as a stand alone blaster or tied directly to Sage ACT! It competes with Constant Contact and has some compelling reasons to switch over.

How Long Does it Take?
It takes a wopping 5 extra minutes to come up with a subject line for an email that will get opened. Here’s a great tip - if you aren’t good at creating great subject lines - I bet some of your customers are - how about sending a smaller email blast to close contacts at schools with the subject line: Can you help me create a subject line for this School Based Email Blast? Or run a contest for the best submission until you get the hang of it. The companies that send the largest email blasts will test 2 to 5 subject lines with smaller populations, look at the open rate, then shift all of the subject lines on a massive blast to the one with the highest open rate. And it costs almost nothing to do it.

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So here is what I mean by ‘working remotely’ take the quiz: Can you connect into your office systems at get decent network speed when connected from your home computer, from our company issued notebook computer, from your iPad or tablet? Can you connect from a hotel or coffee shop? Can you get to all of your critical business applications, email, invoices, work orders, schedules, projects, a spreadsheet when you are connected remotely? Picture sitting at your kitchen table and being able to send an invoice to a customer and generating revenue or knowing where everyone is all the time because you have the ultimate in scheduling. And what if the office network is down - having the ultimate flexibility is that your systems have enough data on your mobile device and on your notebook computer to answer basic customer questions in an emergency and have some level of functionality. How do you score yourself. Guess what - it’s 2012. Even iPads can connect to computers, servers etc. and give you functionality when you are out of the office. Are your connections slow - like watching paint dry, in this day and age - they shouldn’t be. Is the answer to put everything in the cloud? The answer depends on a) whether or not you have unlimited resources and b) if your ego won’t take a hit when you move at least part of your systems back in a couple of years.

I had a customer say to me last week: ‘The best thing you ever did was set us up so that everyone had remote connections in with Terminal Services. Why did we do it any other way before you suggested it and why would anyone that is figuring out how to do their network now - do it any other way - I just don’t understand it’. My answer was simple - short-sightedness of not wanting to spend a few extra thousand dollars to save many multiples of that in the future AND not realizing that one day they are going to be sitting at their kitchen table during Hurricane Sandy wondering why they can’t get to everything they need [I added that last part].

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Enter from stage left the Ultimate Husband and Wife Calendar: Sage ACT! Contact Manager sync’ed with Google via Gmail. What does Google’s shared calendars not have that the combination has?
- A sophisticated system for marketing to your business contacts
- The ability to tie a contact name to a meeting, conference call etc., sounds basic, it’s not. While you have someone on the phone you decide to meet on Tuesday, you simply schedule an appointment with who you had on the phone [it knows] and pick a time
- Ability to convert an email with details into an appointment or scheduled phone call at a specific time

So imagine this - this is a real life possibility - You receive an email from a customer that sets and agenda for a dinner meeting next week on Thursday, not only can you see your family calendar to determine if you need to take your son to his soccer practice, you confirm via email and convert the Outlook email to an appointment on your calendar with one button and it automatically blocks out your time so your husband/wife knows he/she can’t move one of her appointments that require you to be at home to make dinner that night. And you don’t have to buy extra software for your husband/wife or teach him/her how to use it - the partner is just using Google’s shared calendar. It goes beyond with Microsoft and Google can do on their own OR combined. If you need to see it in action, call us.

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If it’s not related to overall file attachment sizes then another area to look is to check if there are old sync users [remote database users] that are no longer in use but never had their sync disabled. If the old sync files are sitting around the ACT! database is continuing to accumulate data on all of the changes to contacts, notes, history etc. that have not been released to the remote database that is no longer in use - the result, a massively growing tumor attached to your ACT! database that will bloat the size of the ACT! data file.

Remedy: Disable the old sync’s so the database doesn’t keep tracking the changes and things should return to normal. If the file size does not reduce immediately, call a Certified ACT! Consultant or the Sage support line.

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There are several mistakes that most people make when they go through the process of recording where their referrals are coming from. Believe it or not most people DO NOT ask where someone got their phone number when they call to find out information about a product or service. Most are so excited that someone called that they fail to ask exactly where the referral is coming from. The second mistake that most people make is they don’t dig deep enough to get the actual source, especially when it comes to the Web. When someone responds with the answer, “We found you through your website…” the majority of people stop and fail to ask the most important question, “Do you remember how you got to our website - we invest quite a bit in making sure that people can find us - do you remember how you got there?” If you don’t ask, you won’t know if it’s your website optimization, a testimonial on yahoo, google or yelp or some other linked website that transported them to your website. The answers over time will help you determine how to spend your time and money in gaining Web Referrals.

Now it comes down to recording the referral where again we find a common mistake made by most people that record the source of the referral. Most people will create a field in their database that is either called SOURCE or REFERRED BY. That’s not a completely lame attempt because it quantifies the answer to some degree but it falls short in terms of being able to track referrals. We recommend a minimum of two fields: REFERRED BY and REFERRED BY WHOM. I know you’re saying, “OK genius, what’s the difference….”

The REFERRED BY field should be a drop down box that allows you to pick the category of the source of the referral, not the specific person. Here are some examples Customer, Google, Yahoo, Chamber of Commerce, BNI, Email Marketing etc. Then the REFERRED BY WHOM field would have the name of the person, ex. LOU NICHOLS. Tracking it this way does two things. It allows you to ask questions like, how many referrals have we gotten in total from the Chamber? But the REFERRED BY WHOM field let’s you take it a whole step further….

Here is where the money is at - tracking the referral tree…..
You notice that when you finish the job for Sam Jenkins that he was referred to you by Lou Nichols. You call to thank Sam for his business then you pick up the phone to call Lou Nichols. You mention to Lou that it is only because of his referral that you were able to do the work for Sam and you thank him. In addition to that you notice on Lou’s record that he was referred to you by Jim McGrath from the Chamber of Commerce. You then call Jim McGrath and say, “Jim I just wanted to thank you, we just finished up work for a guy that you probably don’t know - his name is Sam Jenkins but I never would have met him if it wasn’t for you referring me to Lou Nichols. Both Sam and Lou are now very likely to refer you out again. And it goes on and on back until you get to the very original source in situations where you have been spinning off the referrals for years and if you drew it out on paper it would look like a referral tree.

Best of luck.

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 Most indications are that the problem is occurring specifically for users that initiate email messages from the Act! Contact Detail screen by clicking on the email address hyperlink to create an email.  Users that create the email from scratch using Outlook and then identify who to send it to by using the Act! address book are not experiencing the same issue.  In the background a significant amount of RAM is being used by Act! after the emails are initiated using the hyperlink and other functions like closing an activity are effected in a negative way.  The problem also exists if the user initiates the email from the Contact Detail screen and clicks on the Email Button on the Act! toolbar.

There is a hot fix that will be addressing this issue [expected in SP1 - Hot Fix 3] but there is a work-around in the mean time.  If the Act! software starts to perform slowly, close Act! and re-open it to reset the amount of RAM allocated to the application.  From that point forward, use Outlook to initiate email as described above and use the Act! address book to fill in the To: Field or copy and paste the email address from the Act! Contact Detail screen if your address book is not set up properly on your computer [this is fixable with a phone call to our help line].

 The problem described here is significantly persistent for people that use Act! via Microsoft’s remote connectivity feature - Terminal Services.

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 Most indications are that the problem is occurring specifically for users that initiate email messages from the Act! Contact Detail screen by clicking on the email address hyperlink to create an email.  Users that create the email from scratch using Outlook and then identify who to send it to by using the Act! address book are not experiencing the same issue.  In the background a significant amount of RAM is being used by Act! after the emails are initiated using the hyperlink and other functions like closing an activity are effected in a negative way.

There is a hot fix that will be addressing this issue [expected in SP1 - Hot Fix 3] but there is a work-around in the mean time.  If the Act! software starts to perform slowly, close Act! and re-open it to reset the amount of RAM allocated to the application.  From that point forward, use Outlook to initiate email as described above and use the Act! address book to fill in the To: Field or copy and paste the email address from the Act! Contact Detail screen if your address book is not set up properly on your computer [this is fixable with a phone call to our help line].

 The problem described here is significantly persistent for people that use Act! via Microsoft’s remote connectivity feature - Terminal Services.�

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If this happens don’t open the file - call an Act! consultant.  Most importantly call them BEFORE you develop another problem with your database.  This is known problem since Act! 2008 and your Act! consultant can work with you to find a work around for this issue.

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You can add your own custom help documents (PDF, MS WORD, EXCEL) to the ACT! 2007 Premium Help Menu NOTE:  the corresponding applications (Adobe Reader, MS Word, MS Excel, etc.) must be installed on the computer or server where ACT! is running so that the help document can be opened.

1.  Save the custom help document in a folder on the ACT Server that all users have full rights to.

2.  Open ACT!

3.  Choose Tools | Customize | Menus and Toolbars

4.  Click on the Custom Commands tab

5.  Click on the New button

6.  Specify the following:

            a.  Command Name (what will appear on the Help Menu)

            b.  Tooltip text (displays when user puts mouse pointer on Help Menu item)

            c.  Location of the Custom Help Document (use the Browse button)

7.  Click on the Add Command button

8.  Click on the Commands tab and select Custom Commands

9.  Click, Drag & Drop the Custom Command from the left navigation pane to the Menu bar and release when you have the item where you would like it in the Help Menu system

10.  Close the Customize Menus and Toolbars window

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