How to organize manage and store your mailing list!

HI - I would like to share this because it's been hell for me to get it figured out! I put a bunch of energy into doing wrong and I have to re-do it now.

I have an online retail business. My list should be 10,000 now if i had been managing it correctly and growing by a minimum of 1,000/year.

I also use Quickbooks Customer Manager which I am unhappy with (it's a very heavy program that gets overloaded if you use too many of its features) but we are too far into it now to change. It is clear that we cannot "store" and manage our email lists in that program.

This is my question:

I want to compile- and grow on an ongoing basis- a simple database of my email list names. I want to keep info about each name/address such as country, size, how they found us, existing customer or not, etc. I then want to use that list, select the group I want from it at the given time and use Vertical Response to send an email to the group I am targeting, such as Everyone in England.

My question is, how do I "store" and manage this info on my computer? What is the most efficient way? I know I can take this list and upload it to VR. I know VR will save it for me and will prevent me from sending duplicates.

But assuming the list changes( because it is growing, or a prospect has changed into an existing customer) each time I send by VR, I do not want to simply resend old lists FROM VR plus new lists of "new names". That is too disorganized. That won't maintain my "fields", etc. I want to store and grow my email lists with my own selected fields of information, sort as I want so i can really target email campaigns as I get better at this, and then use VR to send to the group I want to target at that time.

What is the best way to to do this? Excel? I am thinking it sounds too inefficient to log into VR every time I want to add a new name to my list, and VR doesn't have "fields" for managing customer factoids, does it? It just stores lists, not fields, is my impression.

OK!

Here is the advice I got from an expert right here in the VR community! I am hoping that I wil be able to add boxes that I can "tick" to an excel spreadsheet so that I can sort by my own personally-created fields and sort that way, but it sounds like i can:

Reply by JP Collins
"I consult for the San Francisco Small Business Development Center and have my own email marketing clients and what I tell them is to start with the basics. Put it all into a spread sheet. Excel or whatever. From there you can export it to csv or tab delimited which can be uploaded to your VR account. However, that format can be exported into a more robust database like FileMaker or up to a Contact Management System like SalesForce or Highrise HQ.

I often keep my lists in different spreadsheets for specific types of clients organized by the month and year or the campaign. This is all on my hard drive which gets backed up. I can export those lists into my CMS and into VR. That way if I do need to locate a name or an address I can search on my VR lists, my CMS and if I need to on my hard drive.

It sounds a little cumbersome but if you organize your directories and files properly, it keeps your data in order. I'm sure there are other ways of doing this but this is what I've found works with my workflow and it often works for a lot of the sole proprietors I talk to."

Tags: list, mailing, management, organziation, storage

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Permalink Reply by Smart Marketing on March 27, 2009 at 1:42am: Hello,

I consult databases to the Telecomunications industry and am a certified trainer for IBM, I find your post here an interesting read which is why I was promted to respond. As I understand your post, your wanting to update from Quickbooks customer to a more robust content management system that will still allow you to segment your information, so you can access and get the reports you need for marketing, campaing, workflow or financial reasons.

In my industry experience tells me, what you want and what you have may not be the ideal situation just yet, with any content management system first things first, we need to identify if your hard drive has the ability, the specs and the memory to be able to handle what your looking for in a software program.

Do you also have the available server space for all of the information your collecting and gathering as well

Now before I go further please let me explain that in order for me to make a comment about software and CMS systems, I need to be clear that your overall business operations is also apart of this equation and are you wanting to automate that process or are you just wanting to automate and systemise your list?

This could be something else you need to consider as part of this new overhall your thinking about, not sure if you have looked at your billing, work flow, sales initiated, sales presented, sales closed as part of the system. Be good to know your thoughts about this also.

I share this with you because your question of wanting to compile- and grow on an ongoing basis- a simple database of email list names and wanting to keep info about each name/address such as country, size, how they found you, existing customer or not, etc could be just part of an overall picture.

So in hindsight Id like to address just this question for now and I like what JP Collins has sugested, but your list is growing in size and there is a smarter way of managing 10,000 members when your list gets there. heres the problems to your goal.

Size of list growing, segmentation, marketing reports, but the kicker here is the exporting of the list now like I said earlier what you want & what you have available may not be able to come together but for a price you can have what ever you like if your prepared to pay for such a software.

Unfortunately depending on your business you may not have the budget like the big corporations do to pay me for my expertise as a programmer, but heres a place Id encourage you to start looking the software is called ICMS- its an IBM program, its a database system that communicates between your departments, like billing, dispatch, sales and quality control, you can segment your customers by gender, age, spend. location including town, country,

You can also capture customer spend and other demographic things to do with business marketing, if your looking at growing your list, setting up future projections like an online customer loyalty program. ICMS is robust and commercially safe to grow with you and you can have the confidence to know that when your entering a sales order, or joining a new customer up this system wont collapse on you.

Like I said you can pull customer information at different levels, you can join new customers up and assign them a customer #, account # or you can access their information by phone #, first name, last name, or address. as your business grows so will your staff.

So as your staff gets promoted you can also assign them different levels of security access for example, sales staff can run what we call a new connection, perhaps a winback from your competition, and put in sales orders that need to be sent to dispatch for delivery and they can track that whole process from entry into your business to exit.

How ever your manages can also have the same access but they can aprove other things like a DFA or delegated financial authority- they can acces credit management records etc and you as the owner can have the final say on all operations if you wish.

Like I said earlier software of this nature does not come cheap, but if you find the money & time to invest in software thats commercially sound like this one, your business value will increase 100 fold, your work flow will become totally automated, your marketing team and accounting team will love you for it. As the reports and information you would get from your database would position you very strongly against even some of the big players in the industry.

So my sugestion is do your research and have a look at what ICMS has to offer your business, its not cheap but very well worth its weight in gold....; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Whirlingturban on March 27, 2009 at 3:29am: I really thank you for your thoughtful response. I hope more people can find out about some of these systems before they get into the wrong one. It's such a shame to buy software, train people and get your information all entered into it order to test it and find out whether its right for you are not. I do hope someone with a bigger business than mine can benefit from your remarks here! I also think it would be nice if VR had a fact-finding section for people looking for orientation about this subject and options of ways to organize their email list and custom data in various ways.

I have already learned the hard way that I am going to have to manage my mailing lists (many of whom are not existing customers) separately from Quickbooks Customer Manager, and I've learned what a really limited program QBCM is. (And we are a VERY small business- IMHO it would really break down completely if one used it in the way it is presented... unless one only has about 100 customers!) But we are stuck with it for now- we've spent the last 6 months getting converted into it! So a separate solution like Excel is the way I think we are going to have to go specifically for mailing list management. If it means we can't track and utilize all those little gems of information we have about our customers, so be it.

Katherine; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kim Stiglitz on March 27, 2009 at 1:26pm: Hi Katherine,
You might also want to check out our How to Build & Segment Your List webinar on April 23. Our Education & Training Manager, Richard Huffaker, will talk about the best ways to build your mailing list and go over how you can get the most from your list using the Segments tool.

Register here.

Cheers,
Kim; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Whirlingturban on March 27, 2009 at 8:48pm: HI- I did watch the entire webinar- the one that was "recorded"- since I am in the wrong time zone to attend a live one. I guess I am doing a horrible job of explaining to you what the issue/question is because the aspects addressed in your resources-and in your responses- are not the issues I am talking about needing help with. However, JP Collins, a few users over in the "email design developers" (pr similarly named ) group has helped me. I think I need to go with an excel sheet.

To reiterate- I have already taken advantage of all your tutorials. That is always my first approach. Maybe I missed something but I did read and watch them all. I wouldn't be bothering people in the forum if I had been able to find the answers there.

Cheers,
Katherine; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Richard Huffaker on March 30, 2009 at 11:09am: Hi Katherine,

It sounds like Excel spreadsheets will likely be the way to do what you want, but I do want to note a few things you can do within VerticalResponse that you may or may not already be doing that could potentially make this easier.

You mentioned in your first post:

"What is the best way to to do this? Excel? I am thinking it sounds too inefficient to log into VR every time I want to add a new name to my list, and VR doesn't have "fields" for managing customer factoids, does it? It just stores lists, not fields, is my impression."

VerticalResponse does store the fields you upload. At least if your account has been upgraded (free upgrade) to the most recent version of our List Management system. The new List Management system stores all the fields you create (you can have around 200 custom fields) at the account level, whereas the old system stored those fields at the list level. So with the old system your records would lose all their fields in the new list you upload, but with the new system we'll recognize any already existing records in a new list and pull all their fields over.

How can you tell if you're using the new system? If you are, you'll see a VR created Master List in the Lists section of your account.

Also, you can append new lists to already existing lists in your account (as opposed to uploading those new lists as, well, new lists). To append a file to an already existing list, you'd just need to go to the actions link to the right of the list and select Append.

You may already know all of this, but I wanted to jump in here in case I could provide any new info for you!; ▶ Reply to This