Creating messages and letters from pre-defined templates is a common task performed in CRM and contact management software applications. Templates are a valuable tool for streamlining your marketing communications and activities. In this post last April, I posted about how it is not readily apparent how to accomplish this in Business Contact Manager (BCM) and I offered a work-around using the Quick Part feature. Since then I’ve learned more about BCM so I thought I would provide an update.

I have 3 broad categories text that I like to reuse:

1. Personalized content – you have "boiler plate" forms that you want to personalize with contact specific info (name, company, etc.). Mail merge is usually the best tool for this job. I covered mail merge with BCM in a previous post.
2. Snippets (sentences or paragraphs) of text that you often repeat. An example may be directions or product description snippets. Quick Parts are a good tool for this common message fragments.
3. Messages that, by and large, don’t change depending on the recipient. An example may be a generic response to a request for information.

In many contact management systems, you create a template based message by selecting something like "Create Message From Template". In BCM it’s a little harder to find because BCM calls them Forms. Let’s create a template first and then figure out how to use it to create a new message.

Creating a template is fairly straight forward. Start by creating a new mail message. Add your subject, message, attach files, etc. Choose Save As… from the menu and save the message as an Outlook Template (*.oft).

To create a new message from this template, you need to select a Form. You can do this through the File | New menu

or the Tools | Forms menu

On the Choose Form dialog, change the Look In option to User Templates in File System, select the template you want to use and click open.

That’s all there is to it. By the way, there really isn’t anything specific to BCM here – since BCM is built on top of Outlook, you can use these techniques to create and use templates in Outlook even if you don’t use BCM.

My obsessive testing of CRM software demos has kept me away from blogging for a few days. The good news is these demos inspired to try some things in Business Contact Manager (BCM) and I discovered a few things I didn’t know.

One thing that I had struggled with is creating a form letter (mail merge) from within BCM. I had not been able to find the Mail Merge command in Outlook, so I always started my mail merges in Word. This made for an awkward workflow when working with contacts. I’m not sure why I missed this for so long – I think it is because I usually open contacts be searching for them rather than using one of the contact views.

It turns out that if you are in one of the contact views like this:

Then you can access the Mail Merge command under Tools menu.

From here you can indicate that you want to merge only the current record and you can pick which form letter to use. You can also change the merge options to create an e-mail:

This works in any contact view, so you can use it for Outlook contacts as well if you don’t use BCM.

One of my complaints about Outlook with Business Contact Manager (BCM) has been the responsiveness of the program. It has been sluggish for me – sometimes pausing for extended periods of time. It was getting annoying enough that I was starting to look for a new solution.

In my case, the main cause of this sluggishness appears to be Windows Desktop search indexing. I have turned off the indexing for a couple of days, and BCM has been very snappy.

This presents a little bit of a dilemma for me because I regularly use the search feature. If I can’t find a way to correct this, I may have to go to a third party search utility. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations?

As mentioned in a previous post, Outlook with Business Contact Manager (BCM) provides some basic tracking information about your campaigns. This screen shot shows a portion of the tracking page of campaign form:

This form show totals for the number of leads, opportunities, accounts and contacts that were generated by the campaign. These totals are calculated using the "source" field for the different records. For example, the total in the leads box is calculated by counting the number of lead records (business contacts with the "lead" check box checked) that have a source equal to this campaign.

There is also a place to record the total cost of the campaign. This cost is not calculated – you provide it.

The bottom portion of the form shows the campaign recipients for certain campaign types (see this post on campaign types) along with the delivery status.

Unless you are using the e-mail delivery service, I don’t see the delivery status as being particularly useful.

I think most small business owners will be interested in two main measures when evaluating their campaigns. The most obvious measure will be the cost of the campaign vs. the amount of sales it generates.

To find the amount of sales generated by a campaign you can run the Opportunities by Marketing Campaign report

and then filter is by Sales Stage to show only the opportunities won

You can compare the total from this report to total cost of the campaign that you calculated previously to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

The goal of your campaign may be to build your permission based mailing list. In this case, it makes more sense to use a count of leads generated rather than a dollar amount to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

I will return to posting about tracking campaigns in BCM, but I ran into something today that I am surprised was not handled in BCM. I have outlined one solution here – please let me know if you have a different\better way of handling this.

I want to keep track of when I start working with a new customer. I want to know when I reach certain customer anniversaries – 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, etc.

As far as I can tell, there is no built in way to flag an account or contact record as being a customer. I can create a "Customer" category and use it to flag contact and\or account records, but I can’t report on the date they became a customer.

My solution was to create a user-defined field to record the "customer start date". You can create a user-defined field via the Customize Forms option of the Business Contact Manager menu.

I decided to add the new field to the Account form, which means I will need an Account record for each of my customers. You could decide to add the field to the Contact records (or both) if you prefer.

On the next form select which page of the Account form set where you want to display your new field:

Next click on the Add Field button to bring up the next screen:

Name your field and select the data type and format. Save your work.

Now when you open an Account record and navigate to the user-defined fields page, you have a new field that you can use to record when you started working with this customer

To create a report that shows those customers with a start date anniversary, start with any one of the Account reports. Click on Filter Report and then select the Advanced Filter tab. Use the Customer Start date that you created to filter the report. In this example, I’m filtering to show those customers that have an anniversary date in November:

I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this, but I think this method gives me the most flexibility for tracking and reporting.

Do you have a different method for tracking this sort of information?