Database Potential – Clever Consolidating

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on collecting, consolidating and connecting to people via a database.

Introduction

I’m surprised by the number of business people I’m meeting who fall into one of these categories when it comes to databases:

1.  Don’t have one. They want one. Know they need one. But don’t know where to start and what they should do with it once they have it.

2. Have one. A large one. Collected or inherited. Don’t know how to best use it or leverage it without being pesky or wasting days dealing with frustrating and retarded Outlook newsletter templates etc.

In any case, you need an effective and easy way to collect, consolidate and then connect with the database.  I’m a firm believer in allowing technology to do all the hard work for you.  Gone are the days of expensive direct mail and wasted paper.  Welcome to the world of emails, RSS feeds, blogging and new media. Where one person can effortlessly reach thousands with very little effort.

Part 2 – Consolidating

So you’ve followed Part 1 and you have a stack of email addresses. Hopefully you have put them in an excel spreadsheet colomn so that they can be easily exported to whatever platform will serve you best.

There  are some great online platforms out there to put your database on so you can regularly connect with the people you need to.

Feedburner: Google’s feedburner is a free service that allows people who visit your blog or RSS powered website to Subscribe to get your blog posts via email each time you write one. It’s a little limited in functionality but would suit most people. One of the downsides to feedburner is that you can’t import other people’s email addresses – they need to do that themselves.  Check out feedblitz if you want to import your existing database of addresses (it’s not free though)  www.feedburner.com

Campaign Monitor: If you want send out newsletters not generated from  a blog featured site or published online then Campaign Monitor is a good option.  It allows you to import your contacts and then create a email that will be sent out. The best thing is, it allows you to track who has opened the email etc.  A great way to focus on your followup calls and rate the success of the email.  It’s also got a great function that will allow you to see what your newsletter looks like in many of the email clients out there. e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo mail.  It’ll also tell you if your email is likely to get caught and filtered out by spam filters.  It’s a pay-per-email-address- you- send-to model. www.campaingmonitor.com

Aweber: If you want to create a campaign with a heap of follow-up emails that are automatically sent in timed succession to the recipient then Aweber is a great option.  It integrates a lot of clever tools and is priced fairly reasonable. Again, it’ll allow you to import your collected addresses and continue to add them as you get them.    www.aweber.com

Next week we’ll finish the series with CONNECTING. I’ll give you some creative ways to connect with your database and create some business.