Professional Service Firm Marketing Tips & Strategies

ACT! + Swiftpage = Great Small Business CRM

As part of the Authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coach network, I recently became more involved with a couple of tools that, when used together, provide a very robust and very affordable CRM system for small businesses and independendent professionals.

Swiftpage, the number one integrated email marketing solution for ACT! by Sage, introduces a marketing automation platform to its already robust service - giving you the tools to automatically reach out to your ACT! Contacts, Groups, Look Ups and Companies.

Regular readers here know I have a passion for technology and automating systems. I've written about small business CRM here in the past. I was critical of ACT a couple of years ago when the version at that time did not work with Office 2009. It also had some serious performance issues at that time. I'm happy to say I've been using ACT version 11 for a while now, and all of those issues appear to have been fixed.

I also used to write about Outlook with Business Contact Manager, but I eventually stopped using that product because of the lack of Activity Series and some other automation shortcomings.

So far, I am very pleased with the ACT \ Swiftpage combination. Swiftpage provides very robust campaign management and allows you to work with your ACT contact database, so you can avoid the issue of having customer data in different systems (a pet peeve of mine).

Here are a few things that Swiftpage can help you do:

On Demand Marketing - World -Class Email Marketing - Integrated into your ACT! environment gives you the ability to Create, Send and Track Email Marketing blasts.

Survey Tool - Gather valuable data from prospective or current customers and automatically build new or update your existing ACT! contacts.

Sales Force Automation -

1. Swiftpage Call List - A ranked list of your most interested contacts based on the way the interacted with your email marketing blast.
2. Send As - Allow one user to send on behalf of your entire sales team
3. Snapshot tab - Gather valuable contact profile information from the web with a single click and more.

Marketing Automation - Swiftpage Drip Marketing - Swiftpage Drip Marketing blends simple functionality, like the ability to automatically send a sequence of marketing messages to a contact that fills out a form on your website, with intelligent technology that will send different messages to contacts based on their previous actions. For example, send a postcard to those that did not open the previous email - automatically!

I'll be posting more about this great combo and how to use it to grow your business. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about your experience using these tools.

Mozy Backup In Top 50 Websites of 2007

Not quite 1 year ago, I posted about the backup service that I use called Mozy. Apparently, I'm not the only one who likes there service - Time Magazine recently named them among the Top 50 Websites of 2007. If you are a Mozy user, head over to the Time website and rate their service.

If you still don't back up you computer, head over to Mozy and give them a try.

Backing Up Your Files Couldn't Be Easier

You know you're supposed to back up your computer, but do you? Really? Chances are you don't, unless you recently lost some files or had a computer crash. So you've learned your lesson and you will back up from now on, right? Right. Until you forget. Or get too busy.

Hopefully, I'm just describing myself and you already back up your files religiously. If not, you may want to check out Mozy. Mozy is a free service that takes all of the thought and effort out of backing up your computer. The free service gives you 2 GB of space and you can earn more space through their referral program. You can also purchase 30GB of space for only $4.95 a month.

I've been using Mozy for a couple of months now. After a very quick registration and setup process, I was ready to backup my machine. The first backup you do takes a little time, depending upon how much data you are backing up. After only backs up what has changed, so it happens very quickly. Now the only time I think about backups is when I say "cool!" when I see my notification that my files have been backed up.

Mozy encrypts the files on your machine before sending the files to their servers so your data is secure.

So no more excuses, head over to the Mozy Website, sign up for a free account and never worry about backing up your files again.