Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
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Prevent Duplicate Entries |
| Insightly customers have asked us for duplicate checking features, which is a good idea that will move up our request list as it gets more votes. While we all wait for that to move up the priority list, an extra step can save you from creating duplicate items as you enter them or import them into Insightly. If you’re adding a new contact or some other item directly to Insightly, use our global search at the top of the page to perform a quick search for its name before you start adding it. Bonus tip: You can right-click any search results to open matching items in a new tab instead of navigating away from your current page. If it already exists, you can do a fast check of the record to see if it needs updating. Insightly does perform duplicate checks when you’re importing organizations or contacts, but duplicates are only recognized if there’s a two-point match on the information you’re importing. Be sure you include as much information as you can in the import file, including names, phone numbers, and email addresses. This will help block duplicate records from being created in Insightly and keep your contact records clean. |
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Keep Your Email Marketing Lean and Clean |
Email marketing is a great tool for reaching prospective clients and keeping current customers updated. It’s important to keep messages and contact lists under control to avoid breaking the many international SPAM laws and driving away customers. For people who sign up for information, you might want to consider whether single or double opt-in methods are best for your business (your email marketing software might already have double opt-in available to you). By keeping your contact lists lean and clean, you’ll avoid sending the same message twice, which can be a turn-off and prompt more unsubscribes. Monitoring reader engagement with your email campaigns through the many statistics available to email marketers can also give you an idea how well things are performing and help you with planning future campaigns. Although Insightly isn’t a marketing platform, we do include email template statistics to help you understand how templates used in our CRM are working for you; email marketing platforms also include these metrics, like open rates and click rates. From initial sign-ups through customer interactions with your messaging, managing your email marketing through the entire cycle will help you get more for your effort. |
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Organize Your Mobile Address Book |
| As we save contact lists into our mobile phones and other devices, more and more of us don’t feel the need to remember phone numbers. But if it’s so easy to keep our contacts organized, why are there so many different apps to help us manage them on our Android and iOS devices? It turns out that no matter which devices we have or which apps we use, any information we want to keep track of requires some good, old-fashioned organizing and maintenance. Before starting any process that could change or remove information, perform a backup for each of your devices, apps, and services; for example, you can usually export your contacts to a CSV file. If you have multiple address books in Gmail, Yahoo, and other programs, you should consider consolidating them into one (or two, if you want to keep a separate list for work contacts). Check for duplicates: If you have the same contact listed three times with different email addresses and phone numbers, merge them together using the available settings and remove any outdated information. There are different apps that can help you with this process, but you’ll spot things that computers and software just can’t. If a computer could do it all for you, you wouldn’t end up with a messy contact list in the first place. |
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About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions and improve their work processes for over ten years.
Image courtesy of cuteimage at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
