Tag: BigContacts
How to Video – Managing User Roles & Permissions - Story From: BigContacts Product News
February 17th, 2011, Comments Off
As promised, we have created a video that will walk you through all of the features and capabilities of our new user roles and permissions module. This video is in reference to the blog post released on 02.16.2011
Take a look and please feel free to visit our support center with any additional questions you may have.
BigContacts – now a Certified Partner of HubSpot - Story From: BigContacts Product News
December 10th, 2010, Comments Off
A website is a very important part of any business today. Your website operates as a virtual storefront, a cyber window into your world. A well designed and optimized website can help you to:
- Create more visibility for your business
- Generate more qualified leads, and ultimately
- Convert more new clients for your business
The challenge most businesses face is how and where to turn to get affordable and competent help in designing and updating your website. A standard HTML website requires that you either know how to write in HTML or hire someone every time you need to update anything on your site. When you’re paying someone by the hour the costs can add up quickly.
Over 18 months ago BigContacts faced this same challenge. It was so expensive and took so long to make updates and enhancements to our site that we essentially let it sit – hoping that what we had was good enough to help us grow our business. To make matters even worse, we had no way to measure our success as the website we had provided no tools for us to monitor and analyze the traffic that was visiting BigContacts.
It was through great fortune that we found HubSpot. HubSpot has provided us with the tools we need to easily manage our own website. These easy-to-use tools have helped us to significantly grow our web presence over the past year and a half. And today we can say, with confidence, that not only have we doubled our web traffic and qualified leads, we now know the areas we need to continue to work on and improve going forward so that we can continue to grow our business.
Seeing results like we have, we believe so strongly in this great resource that we have decided to integrate BigContacts with the HubSpot platform. Soon all BigContacts subscribers that also have a HubSpot “Medium” or “Large” account will be able to seamlessly capture, nurture and convert leads that come directly from your website. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new integration!
If you are serious about growing your web presence, generating more qualified leads from your website and converting more of these leads to clients, you NEED to put HubSpot to work for you.
Learn More about this great platform and how this can work with BigContacts to help you streamline your sales and marketing efforts.
Got duplicate Contact Records? A new tool for your Contact Manager! - Story From: BigContacts Product News
November 16th, 2010, Comments Off
We have just released a de-duplication (de-dupe) tool for Contact Management Software. With this new tool, you will be able to merge standard contact fields, custom fields and ALL notes & history!
This new tool will allow you to check for duplicate records using (contact names) or (email addresses) as the primary comparison points. You can also filter for a certain subset of your contacts. For example, you may only wish to look at all of the contact records with the last name of (Smith) in your search for duplicate records. This tool will allow you to narrow your filter down to any subsection of contacts to make your de-duplication work more manageable.
The are two primary “use cases” for the BigContacts de-dupe tool.
Importing contacts
When importing contacts to your BigContacts account you can choose to have the de-duplication tool automatically activated after a new list of contacts has been imported. You will find a checkbox where you can select option when using the import wizard. This will allow you to quickly and easily identify new contacts that have been imported that are in fact duplicates of records that already exist in your database.
General database maintenance
From the “Contacts” Tab in the upper left hand corner of the screen you can select the “Show All” button. I here you will find a button labeled “De-Duplication”. Selecting this will activate this tool and allow you to check your entire database for duplicates.
This is a very intuitive and easy-to-use tool, yet is very thorough in what it will allow you to merge in your database.
Using 3 simple screens you can clean up your entire Contact Manager database.
1st Screen
Step 1 – You will select which filtering mode you wish to use (name) or (email). Selecting “name” will group duplicates by first and last name. Choosing “email” will group by both the personal and company email addresses.
Step 2 - You can choose to be more specific/ narrow in your filtering by adding another level of filter. For example, you may only want to work with all contacts that have the last name of “Smith”. In the field provided you would type “smith”. If you want to do a partial search use “%”. For example, if you wanted to match all contacts with a bigcontacts.com email address, you would enter “%bigcontacts.com”. This is not a required filed and is only necessary if you wish to further narrow your search.
Step 3 – Select the number of contacts that you wish to be able to view and work with per page as you go through the de-duplication process.
After you have your criteria selected, press the “Proceed” button at the bottom of the screen.
2nd screen
On this screen you will see the contacts that we found to be duplicates based on your search criteria.
There are a few things to pay attention to when reviewing each Contact record.
- Number of contacts – Just under the contact name you will see the number of contacts that were found that are duplicates.
- Field Conflicts – Just under the number of contacts you will see whether or not there were “conflicts” in any of the fields within the duplicate records.
A conflict occurs when two contacts have different values for the same field. You will need to pick one of these values to keep.- If there are conflicts, you will see the name of the field and then be given the choice to select the value that you wish to remain after merging the duplicate records.
- If there are not any conflicts, you will simply see the message “There were no field conflicts.”
If you do not wish to merge a group of contacts, un-check the box in the upper right hand corner of that (Read more...)
Make Contact Management fields “Required” or “Hide” them if you like! - Story From: BigContacts Product News
November 3rd, 2010, Comments Off
Have you ever wanted to hide certain fields that you just don’t use in BigContacts? Or maybe there are certain fields that you really need to have completed by your team anytime a new contact is added or edited in your database. We have just released a need “Field Management” feature that will now allow you to do both.
If you are an administrator on your company’s BigContacts account, you now have access to this “Field Management” feature. This can be accessed by going to the “Admin” Tab and then by selecting the “Field Management” Tab.
It’s our goal to keep any new feature/ module that we add to BigContacts very simple and easy to use. This is no exception. Once you open the “Field Management” tab you will see the view displayed below. There are two columns; one for setting the fields that are going to be “required” in the contact record and a column for those fields that you wish to have “hidden”. Simply make you selections in each column and save the changes. It’s that easy!
So, how does this look on the front-end?
Any fields that you mark as required will now have an (*) asterisk next to them. The next time a contact record is either added OR edited within your system these fields will now be required. If one of your employees/ team members adds or edits a contact record without completing all of the required fields, any field that still requires data will turn red to make it visually very easy to see what is still missing from this record.
As for the hidden fields, they will simply disappear from view as seen below in the “before” and “after” images.
Before hiding certain fields
After hiding certain fields
Please Note: This new feature will initially affect adding contacts, editing contacts, reports, and searching for contacts.
In the future we will extend the “required” field feature to our web-forms. Any web-form that you have connected to BigContacts for lead capture can be set up to require the prospect filling out the form to complete certain fields as well. If they miss or omit a field, our system will direct them back to the form and note the fields that are required in order to complete your web-form.
To learn more about how to use this great tool in BigContacts, start a live chat (Monday – Friday 8am-5pm EST)
Or join us for a live webinar to see first hand how this can work for you in your business.
Please feel free to submit a support ticket or join us for a live chat should you have any questions as you work with this new module.
NEW resource for customizing Contact Management Software - Story From: BigContacts Product News
October 29th, 2010, Comments Off
At BigContacts we’re constantly working to deliver a better user experience. It’s our mission to ensure that you have all the tools you need to get off to a quick and successful start with your new Contact Management (CRM) system.
As you may already know, we already offer an entire suite of articles, videos, user guides, and worksheets to help you get setup and to customize the system in a way that works best for your business.
For your convenience, I have listed links to these resources below:
 |
Video Library |
 |
How-to Articles |
 |
Quick Start Guide |
 |
Customization Worksheet |
So what’s New?
One of the requests we frequently hear is that some customers would like one-on-one consultations to help them think through the organization of their contact database and ultimately the customization of their account with BigContacts. They have a database or spreadsheet now, but they want to figure out a better system for getting organized.
We’ve gone to great lengths to develop self-guided resources for you, but sometimes it makes sense to pay for some one-on-one time to discuss your specific business needs in order to determine the right formula for organizing your database and customizing the system to best meet your specific business needs.
Well, we have listened and now offer a one-on-one “Getting Started with BigContacts” Consultation. This service is geared toward customers that want help in organizing their database of contacts and customizing their system on the front-end. This service will ensure that you implement all of the best practices for organizing your business as you get started with BigContacts.
What’s Included?
- (2) 30 minute phone sessions to discuss your business and determine the best organization of your database
- Areas covered can include (non are required):
- Identify the groups, categories, contacts types and tags needed to best organize your contacts
- Identify common tasks and workflows within your business
- Identify sales process and pipeline stages
- Areas covered can include (non are required):
- Implement customization that is needed in your BigContacts account
- Import your Contacts into BigContacts (all contacts and custom fields – notes and history are not inlcuded in this service)
What does this service cost?
The total time invested to complete this process is approximately 4 hours. In order to cover our core costs, we are offering this new service for a flat fee of $195.
For more information on this service or to get started, give us a call at 1.888.286.6578 Ext. 701
Personalize your Automated Emails with Custom Fields - Story From: BigContacts Product News
October 5th, 2010, Comments Off
As many of you may already know, BigContacts offers a free email drip marketing module that allows you to automate email campaigns in your business. We call this free module our “Autopilot” module. You can easily set up a campaign, and “Autopilot” works automatically in the background sending out targeted emails at specific intervals and assigning tasks to specific people on your team as well.
“Autopilot” is like having a virtual assistant that works for free – helping you to deliver a automated messages to specific groups of your clients and prospects. This module allows you to queue up specific email drip marketing campaigns in one of two ways:
- You can associate specific clients or prospects with an “Autopilot campaign” and the system will automatically start a clock to begin delivering your targeted message through a series of emails to the contacts that you have identified. Along the way, tasks can also be generated to remind someone on your team to follow up on this message that you are delivering to them, etc.
- You can initiate an “Autopilot” drip marketing campaign if you use our webforms feature to collect leads from your website. Our webforms function will not only load the contact information into your BigContacts account for you, but it can also be set up to automatically start a drip marketing campaign for this prospect.
In addition to these drip marketing campaigns running automatically in the background, our system will capture and store a record of each email that has been sent to this contact directly in the “email correspondence” folder for each contact. Having this information at your fingertips gives you a very clear record of the message that has been communicated to that client of prospect the next time they call or you try and reach out to them.
So what’s New?
If you already use this free service through BigContacts you may be asking yourself at this point “so what’s new”?
We have just released custom fields for Autopilot!
One of the biggest challenges with automated drip marketing emails is to deliver a message without looking too canned. How many times have you received an email from a company and knew it was just a canned and impersonal message. Automation can be great, but is only truly effective if it still allows you to deliver custom messages to your audience.
BigContacts gives you the ability to create and populate all sorts of custom fields for each contact. Now you can embed these custom fields into your “Autopilot email templates to deliver very specific content to your contacts – all the while not lifting a finger to actually send the email! Now that’s how automation is supposed to work!
Let’s say, for example, you have a webform on your website that allows prospects to request information on different product lines that you carry. The prospect comes to your site, fills out a form to request information on a certain product line. Let’s say you want to have the system (BigContacts Autopilot) send them an automated email to thank them for their interest and to let them know that you will be sending them a brochure on the {{product}} (fill in the blank here) that they just requested info for.
All of this can now be done using BigContacts Autopilot – your free virtual assistant that works 24/7 and never calls in sick!
Maybe you have gone beyond mailing things and want to have the system not only deliver a reply but to also deliver and unfold an entire campaign of information centered around that specific product, you can now do this with this great tool.
To learn more about how to use this great tool in BigContacts, feel free to start a live chat (Monday – Friday 8am-5pm EST)
Please feel free to submit a support ticket or join us for a live chat should you have any questions as you work with this new module.
IE7 & 8 Users – Get rid of the secure page popup in BigContacts - Story From: BigContacts Product News
August 25th, 2010, Comments Off
BigContacts encrypts all data over the Internet using a secure SSL connection (HTTPS). Our SSL Certificate is provided by the industry’s leader in data encryption – VeriSign. Our entire application operates over the secure (HTTPS) connection – ensuring that your data is properly encrypted and secure when traveling over the Internet.
We do, however use third-party Support Software that does not currently utilize the same HTTPS connection. So, when you click on the “Support” tab within BigContacts, we are actually displaying an outside support program in an i-frame window. We use this as a convenient way to deliver our email and live chat support to all of our subscribers.
If you use either IE7 or IE8 browsers (Internet Explorer) they may display the following pop-up to you when moving between tabs as this one tab “Support” does not currently operate on an HTTPS connection. (we are working to bring this software in-house and eliminate this issue all together.)
IE7 Pop-up Message 
IE8 Pop-up Message 
So how can you get rid of this annoying pop-up message that appears every time you move to another tab within BigContacts? Here’s how it’s done:
If you use the IE7 Browser
- Go to the Advanced Settings Section of your IE7 browser
- In here you will select the “Security” icon from the list of options. This is the icon that looks like a lock
- Scroll down the list and look for the option labeled “Warn if changing between secure and not-secure mode”
- Un-check this option and then apply your changes
If you use the IE8 Browser
- Go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Security
- Select the “Security” tab -> Click the “Custom Level” button
- In the “Miscellaneous” section change “Display mixed content” to Enable
- Save you changes and the pop-up is disabled
** Please note this setting is now changed for all sites that you visit and this warning will not be generated for any site that you visit. It is important to remember that this is a means of protection that IE has in place for you and turning it off will mean that you need to be more aware and careful of sites you are visiting.
BigContacts adds “Sortable Columns” for Reports - Story From: BigContacts Product News
August 18th, 2010, Comments Off
BigContacts offers a number of reporting options that allow you to track anything from general activity, tasks, to your sales pipeline. The most common reporting tool that our subscribers use is the Advanced Search function.
As many of you know, there are essentially two outputs when generating a report using Advanced Search.
- You can choose to export your list to excel
- You can simply select the “Find Contacts” button to display the list directly in the system.
This option can very useful as it not only displays your filtered list of contacts right there in the system, the names listed are all “hyerplinked”. This allows you to select any name on the list to be brought directly to their contact record within the system.
For those of you that are power users, here’s a productivity tip —If you right click on any given name, it allows you to open the contact record in a new window or tab. You can work the contact, update information, add notes, send an email, etc. When you’re done with this record simply close that tab or window and you are right back to your filtered list. You can quickly work your way through a list of targeted contacts using this method.
So what’s new with this function?
We have just added the ability to sort the list using any column header. Simply hover over and clcik on any column header in the report that you have created and the system will sort and reverse sort any column that you choose. Every time you click on the column header it will reverse the sort for you.
This is yet another small but effective tool that we hope will increase your productivity when using BigContacts.
“Custom Date Range” makes for better Reports in your Contact Manager - Story From: BigContacts Product News
August 18th, 2010, Comments Off
There are many uses for the Advanced Search function in BigContacts. You can sort and filter your contacts on virtually every field within our Contact Management Software.
Whether you’re pulling a list together to generate an email to existing clients, queuing up an email marketing campaign for prospects, or simply trying to identify the contacts that you haven’t touched in a while – the Advanced Search function can help.
With all of its positives, there has been one very important feature that was missing. Until now, we didn’t give you the ability to select a custom date range in which to filter and then view your search results. After you generated your list of contacts, you would have to export to excel is you wanted to do any further sorting to try and organize things in some sort of time-line.
We now give you the ability to choose a specific date range for a number of fields within the Advanced Search. These fields are found under the “History” heading in the Advanced Search.
Select the “Reports” Tab
Select the “Advanced Search” sub-tab
Select all of the fields you wish to display in your report
Scroll down to the “History” section and choose the filters you wish to use
Finally, you will “Specify a date range” that you wish to view in your report.
You can now choose a custom date range for:
The date a Contact was added to your database
This can be very helpful for creating a mailing to new clients or prospects that you added to your system during a certain period of time.
The last call or meeting with your Contacts
The last note added for your Contacts
The last email that was sent to your Contacts
-
These three filters give you to ability to quickly identify a subset of your contacts based on when you last “touched” them. Many of our clients plan to use this as a way to identify clients that they have not contacted in a while so that they can plan to reach out to them.
-
There are many uses for this simple, yet important feature. We hope you find it to be an added benefit as you manage your contact data.
ANOTHER Email enhancement for BigContacts - Story From: BigContacts Product News
August 5th, 2010, Comments Off
We recently added a “Reply” feature within the email correspondance folder of each contact record. In addition to “Reply, we have decided to add a “Re-send” Feature.
Often times we hear that one of our subscribers has sent an email to a contact only to find that the contact didn’t read it, or accidently deleted, etc. There is often a need to “Re-send” that email.
Now, from within the same email correspondance folder you can do just that.
To summarize, the two new email features work as follows:
- Emails that are RECEIVED from a contact now have a “Reply” Link next to each email.
- Emails that have been SENT to a contact from the contact record now have a “Re-send” link next to each email.
We hope that these enhancements prove to be very helpful for you in your day-to-day communication with clients and prospects.
Stay Tuned: Our next blog post will be out shortly… We are adding several custom date ranges to our Advanced Search Module.
Please feel free to comment here or send us an email at support@bigcontacts.com with any questions you may have on this article or any other aspect of BigContacts.
Just considering BigContacts?
If you would like to see firsthand how this system works and learn more about it can help you in your business, please join us for a FREE 30 minute webinar.
Already have a Paid Subscription?
We now offer unlimited FREE Training and Best Practices calls for all Paid Subscribers. Join us and we will answer questions, share best pracitces, and ensure that you get the most of out this great platform. Come back as often as you like!
