Posted by Bob Walton on Mon, Apr 12, 2010 @ 07:10 AM
BigContacts has always offered a rather unique feature we call Autopilot.
BigContacts Autopilot allows you to automate email marketing within your business. It's like having an assistant that works for FREE that is delivering your message to clients and prospects for you. You simply tell our system what you want to say and when as you move prospects or clients through the sales process and BigContacts does the rest. BigContacts Autopilot is a FREE service and there is no limit to the emails you can send.
Autopilot allows you to begin and maintain several drip marketing campaigns for clients and prospects. One way that we see customers initiate these drip marketing campaigns is through the use of a "web form" on their website.
A prospect comes to your site and fills out this form to request information or start a free trial of your product and BigContacts not only loads the contact information, it can also initiate an automated email drip marketing campaign complete with a time-line and associated tasks that get assigned to team members along the way.
BigContacts now supports multiple web forms
In the past you could only have one web form and automatically initiate one email drip marketing campaign from this single web form. Now you can create as many web forms as you wish within BigContacts and each of these web forms can initiate their own unique email drip marketing campaign - giving you much greater flexibility on how you can create a series of automated campaigns.
Initiate multiple email drip marketing campaigns from one web form
Lets say you only have the need for one web form, BUT you do allow your prospects to select from several options on this web form. (FREE Trial, newsletter, Brochure) or say they can request information on any of a number of products you offer (Product A, Product B, Product C, etc).
BigContacts now allows you to initiate any one of a number of different drip marketing campaigns from that single web form depending on what that person selects. With this new feature, you can automatically generate and monitor as many campaigns as you need to manage the marketing efforts of your business. The best part of all is that this is a FREE service that is included as part of your paid subscription with BigContacts.
For more information on how to use our web forms, please feel free to view our Web forms feature video, or email us directly at support@bigcontacts.com
Posted by Bob Walton on Wed, Mar 24, 2010 @ 11:45 AM
One of the most painful aspects of implementing a new software program is that it can require too much time to learn and master. Often times this learning curve is made even longer by programs that get bloated with too many unnecessary features - losing the true essence and benefit of the program in the process.
Contact Management (CRM) Software is no exception. Most CRM software on the market is bloated with too many unnecessary features. In addition, many programs do not deliver the intuitive experience that users need in order to quickly and effectively adopt this very important tool in their business.
BigContacts is on a mission to change this reality. We are working tirelessly to continue refining and streamlining our application for our clients. Our goal is to become the MOST intuitive, easy-to-use (yet affordable) Web Based (CRM) Contact Management Software provider on the market today.
In addition to continuing to simplify our user experience, we now offer 4 Tools (free of charge) to ensure a successful implementation of BigContacts within your business.
These Tools are sure to shorten the learning curve and will help you to customize BigContacts to best meet your specific business needs.
I. Quick Start Guide
This newly updated guide covers everything you need to know to setup your system, customize it for your business, and get you off to a quick start.
Donwload it Now
II. Support Center
We have built and continue to enhance our library or articles and downloads. The resources within this library are designed specifically to answer your most commonly asked questions. This is available to you 24 hours per day - 7 days per week.
Visit our Support Center Now
III. Video Library
We want to ensure that you get the most out of this easy-to-use, yet capable Web Based CRM Software.
We have just released a new library of Best Practices Videos that can help you turn our Web Based CRM Software into a true asset for your business.
Think of us as your technology partner - dedicated to your success.
View our Video Library
IV. Daily Webinars to Answer your questions
If you just can't find the answer to your question, feel free to join us any weekday at 3pm EDT. We host daily live webinars where we take your questions. During these webinars you will not only be able to ask specific questions, but one of our representatives will show you on your computer screen how and where to do things within your application.
Come back as often as you like and let us help you get off to a quick start with BigContacts!
Register for a webinar - Get your questions answered
Posted by Bob Walton on Mon, Feb 01, 2010 @ 09:23 AM
We just released a whole new look for Web Based (CRM) Contact Management Software - "BigContacts 1.5".
This is new interface is one of many enhancements we will be implementing during 2010. We have solicited feedback from thousands of users over the past year and it is this "end-user" insight that will continue to drive our platform going forward. It is our mission to develop a software platform that speaks your language and fits around your business process.
Contact Management (CRM) Software has proven that it can improve productivity, streamline processes, and improve the customer experience. The challenge has been getting users within your company to successfully adopt the software in their day-to-day operation, as most systems are too complicated and are NOT designed to function and flow the way you think.
BigContacts 1.5 has taken a big step toward delivering Contact Management (CRM) Software the way you want it.
A few of the enhancements we made:
- New Navigation menu - We have created "easy buttons" for CRM
- Enhanced Contact List - With the click of a single button, you can pull up and begin sorting and filtering your entire contact list.
- Easier to send emails - With one click you can send individual or group emails to your contacts directly from BigContacts.
- Add/Edit Contact Information - enter all information from a single screen
Test Drive BigContacts for 30 days and see for yourself how we are changing the face of Contact Management (CRM) Software.
Register for an Introductory webinar and discover the 3 essential components to look for in Web Based CRM Software and how they will help you in your business.
Give us a call at 1-888-286-6578 and speak with one of our Business Consultants and learn more about how we can help you simplify your business.
Posted by Bob Walton on Sun, Dec 27, 2009 @ 12:07 PM
Before investing in Contact Management Software or Small Business CRM, you need to have all the facts. Most systems today come full of "bells and whistles" that are touted as essential to helping you in your business.
The reality is that many of these features may rarely get used if at all. On the other hand there may be certain features that are critical to your business. This investment requires a methodical approach to ensure that you make the right choice. Don't make your decision based solely on price or on features.
Consider what's important to you before making a quick decision.
- What are the minimum requirements for you business today?
- What are your growth plans and will this system allow you to grow without a significant $ investment?
- Is it easy-to-use; allowing you to get off to a quick start with all of your employees using it?
If you experience any trouble viewing this example of research, Click Here for a full size image of these tables. 
If you would like a comparison to any other Small Business CRM or Contact Management Software, Contact Us at 1-888-286-6578. We will do the detailed research and provide you with an objective and detailed report.
Posted by Bob Walton on Mon, Nov 23, 2009 @ 09:04 AM
At BigContacts we offer a number of reporting options to help you extract meaningful information from the system to help you better manage your business. We are constantly striving to improve what we offer, and encourage our subscribers to give us feedback on what you are looking for in an online contact management (CRM) system. The more feedback we get in a certain area the higher the priority we give to that request.
Based on this feedback, we have just enhanced our "Recent Activity" report. If you're not familiar with this report - it gives you the ability to take the pulse of your business. You can select any or all users in your company to review what they had done over a given period of time. This activity is displayed in chronological order and allows you to review what someone has accomplished for the past 1, 3 or 7 days. You can see virtually everything that has occurred in managing client relationships over a given period. You can view calls made, notes written, emails sent, meetings scheduled, tasks completed, new sales opportunities created, and much more.
The report was a great start, but was still limited in what it delivered. You could only view the activity in chronological order and we limited the time-frame that you could review. We have re-named the report to "Activity Manager" and have added much more flexibility in how you can review activity within your business.
• Select the user you wish to review
• Select the format in which you wish to have the activity displayed
(By date, By Activity Type, By User)
• Select the date range that you wish to view this activity
In addition to all this added flexibility in how you view the activity, we now provide a summary with a "number count" of each activity for that time period. This is great for judging activity levels with sales reps, or even customer service reps. How many calls did someone make in a given period? How many appointments did they schedule? How many tasks were completed? How many new sales opportunities have they identified? and much more...
We hope that this new report will give you more insight and a better pulse on what is going on in your business on a day-to-day basis. For questions, comments or feedback, please email us at support@bigcontacts.com.
Posted by Bob Walton on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 @ 09:18 AM
At Big Contacts we offer a number of options for sending emails to your clients and prospects.
1) You can send and receive emails directly from our system without changing email providers.
2) You can easily filter a list of your contacts to send a group email.
3) You can create email templates complete with standard AND custom merge fields.
4) You can create automated email campaigns to deliver a message to clients and prospects.
Our system will store all of these methods/ modes of email directly in each contact record to make it very easy to track the entire history for each client or prospect.
That's the good news. The challenge, in the past, has been that (being a web based application) it was difficult for our users to simply copy and paste text into an email or email template and properly format all the text to the same font, etc. With this new text editor, you now have the option of pasting in plain text or pasting directly from a Word document.
We have just released one of the latest Email Text Editors on the market today and we hope you will like it.
Here is a preview of that the new toolbar looks like and how you can use it. We encourage you to get in there and click around to discover all of its great new functionality. The editor is so new, that we have yet to create the user guide. This will be coming in the near future, but we hope you will find this new toolbar and its functionality so intuitive that the user guide is not needed.
The Toolbar is the area in email editor where you can activate most of the editor features. Each button in the toolbar access a different function. There are simple functions for basic text formatting and more advanced features like creation of links and tables.
To use the buttons in the toolbar you must move your mouse pointer over the button. The button will highlight and a message with the information about the button function will appear. Click on the button to execute its function. With more experience you will have full control over all email editor features and you won't have to read the description of the buttons. You will just use them intuitively.
Besides the toolbars buttons there are also toolbar combos (drop down boxes). The combos are the white areas with a little arrow on its side. They can be easily accessed by clicking on the white area or the little arrow. Once clicked the menu will expand so you can choose from one of its available options. To execute one of them, simply click on it.
Special Note: We have had many requests from our users to improve the spell checking capability for emails. You asked for it, so here it is. Note above in the toolbar we have highlighted two functions.
The spell check button highlighted in green will allow you to spell check on your command.
The spell check button highlighted in light blue will allow you to enable "SCAYT" (Spell Check As You Type). This is a great feature as you will get instant feedback as you are creating your email document.
There are so many new features available to you now. We encourage you to look around, try it out, and send us emails with any questions or feedback you might have to support@bigcontacts.com
Posted by Bob Walton on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 @ 09:01 AM
One our primary goals as a software service provider is deliver a very intuitive, easy-to-use application for our subscribers. One way we accomplish this is through the concept of our "Contact Dashboard" .
We are one of the few Contact Management (CRM) companies that presents all of your contact history in a very organized manner on a single screen. Putting all of this information on a single screen makes it that much easier to manage your client and prospect relationships as you have everything you need at your fingertips.
Having said that, we realize that all of this information on a single screen can create limitations in other areas. You have told us that you would like a larger, more detailed view of the calendar. The calendar view has been limited to a width of about one-third of the right hand side of your screen. This was done in order to accommodate all the other information we are presenting to you on this dashboard.
We are at the very beginning stages of designing/developing our next generation platform - "Big Contacts 2.0". In the process of this development, we will begin to present you with new and improved designs within the system. This Friday we will release a few small, but helpful enhancements to the calendar.
Expandable Calendar View
From the Contact Dashboard, you will click to expand the calendar folder as you have always done, but you will now notice a new link in the upper left hand corner called (full screen calendar). This link will allow you to expand the calendar to a full screen view.
One of the biggest benefits to this expanded view is that you will now be able to see details of your meetings and your team members' meetings when in the "31" of "31 Group" views.
After you are finished working in your calendar, simply click on the same link in the upper left hand corner (restore calendar) and you are now back to the normal dashboard view to continue working on your clients and prospects.
Meeting Reminders
Another requested enhancement to our calendar is meeting reminders. With this release you will now have meeting reminders available to you.
Each user on the system will determine whether or not they want the meeting reminder activated - based on how they personally prefer to handle their meetings. The user will determine three things in their setup:
* Do they want the meeting reminder feature on or off?
* How far in advance do they wish to have the system begin reminding them?
* Do they want the reminders to repeat?
(The system can be set to as little as 5 minutes to as long as 120 minutes in advance.)
After these settings are determined, the calendar will "default" to this configuration for every meeting that is scheduled, UNLESS you choose otherwise. When scheduling a meeting you will have the option to adjust any of these three settings.
For example, you may NOT want a reminder for certain meetings. Or you may want to be reminded further in advance for one meeting or another. And finally, you may not want to get a repeating reminder for a certain meeting.
(Please note: repeating reminders can be stopped at any time by clicking on "dismiss" in the upper right hand corner of the reminder itself.)
PLEASE NOTE: As we design the 2.0 platform, we want your continued feedback. On the "Contacts" tab in the left hand column under the tools section, we have a "Send Feedback" link. We need constructive insights from subscribers like yourself in order to make this the best Contact Management (CRM) platform in the industry! Please send your suggestions and ideas and we will work hard to implement ideas all that appear to add value to our broader subscriber base.
______________________________________________________
Stay tuned for more great things to come!
Posted by Bob Walton on Sun, Aug 09, 2009 @ 11:54 AM
When choosing Contact Management (CRM) software for your small business, it is important the difference between a Contact Centric and and Account (Business) Centric system. The is one of the biggest mistakes companies make when choosing a Contact Management (CRM) system. At Big Contacts, we are about to give you that choice.
Stay tuned for an announcement of the release of our very unique Business Contact Record. We think you're going to like it!
In Contact Centric systems, the primary organization is around individual contacts. In the Account (Business) Centric systems, there are two levels to the basic organization: a Business (or Account) layer to which multiple individual contacts can be related.
CONTACT CENTRIC
In a contact centric system, the database is organized around individual contacts. So, if you have dealings with 3 different people all from the same company, you would have 3 different contact records and in each record would be the company name.
A Contact centric organization makes sense if you are dealing with individuals and you do not need to do such things as look at an organization's combined history. It is very difficult and clumsy to track company related information separately from contact information. For example, if you want to track information about a company (e.g. sic code, # employees, annual budget, etc.) separately from contact related information (e.g. favorite hobby, home phone number, spouse's name, etc.). There isn't an easy way to do that:
- Under which contact do you store the company information?
- Which contact becomes the primary record?
- Do you store the information under both contacts...which makes updating difficult?
- Do you create a "contact" record to serve as the company record and somehow relate the contacts to it?
ACCOUNT (BUSINESS) CENTRIC
Account (Business) Centric systems have a layer above contact, the business or account that can link multiple contacts together. This has the advantage of being able to track company-related information entirely separately from contact-related information. This approach is usually easier to:
- See all opportunities for an account/company.
- See combined history.
- Do address updates.
- See the organization and all its contacts in one view.
- Report on company vs. individuals easier.
Our Recommendation
If you're working in an industry where you only need one contact record per account, you may want the simplicity of Contact Centric option. However, if you are going to want to track multiple contacts per account (business) then the Account (Business) Centric becomes the best option.
Posted by Bob Walton on Tue, Jul 28, 2009 @ 05:47 PM
BigContacts offers seamless integration with VerticalResponse to deliver a suite of award winning marketing tools. (On-demand e-mail marketing, online survey and direct mail solutions)
VerticalResponse now integrates with the free Google Analytics service to help you further understand how your recipients are responding to your email campaigns and how they interact with your website. Google Analytics is a free service, as is VR’s new integration.
If you're already using Google Analytics to track your website visitors and search campaigns, you know how powerful the information you see can be. Now you can activate Google Analytics for VerticalResponse email campaigns, right from within your account profile, so you can gain insight into where people are going on your site after clicking links in your email message.
Don't have a Google Analytics Account?
Get a FREE Google Analytics Account. Google Analytics is a free online service that lets you track where your visitors come from and the pages they visit on your site. Learning more about visitors' behavior shows where you can make changes or streamline conversion processes on your website to gain more from your site traffic.
You'll be able to see that your site visitors came from a specific email campaign. It's never been easier to track ROI right back to the campaigns you send.
Instant Benefits
- Track email campaigns as another traffic source to your website
- Determine whcih products or services grab customers' attention
- Send follow up campaigns to target people with a tempting offer
- Boost conversion rates by tweaking your purchase process
- Compare email marketing campaigns with other advertising efforts
Getting Started
It's easy to set it up and get started. Visit the "profile" section of your VerticalResponse account, and activate your domain in the new Google Analytics Section.
Download the User Guide and get started!
Posted by Bob Walton on Thu, Mar 19, 2009 @ 01:21 PM
Over the past few years, BigContacts has evolved from a Contact Management System (Small Business CRM) into something much more.
We realized that today's top CRM systems were evolving to include elements of Sales Force Automation (SFA), allowing company's to effectively target and manage larger pools of prospects.
But we felt that there was still something missing in this equation. The foundation to any business that ensures things get done are the processes or work-flows that a company establishes. This is true whether your serving existing clients or going after new prospects.
These processes set the stage and ultimately determine the entire flow of activity and level of efficiency within your business. You could go to great links to develop and articulate these processes, but you need a way to effectively keep score. How well are you serving your clients? Where are the weak points in your business? Who’s delivering on the promises you make to your clients and prospects and who’s falling short? Our system incorporates a discipline we've talked about before and that is Business Process Management (BPM). This discipline, coupled with technology can truly help you streamline your operations and ensure that your business operates as efficiently as possible. Feel free to call one our Account Managers if you would like to learn more about this tool. It's included as part of our core service at Big Contacts, you might as well take full advantage! 1-888-286-6578 Ext. 701
Well, this is where we are today, but we feel that our work has just begun. Our mission is to deliver a platform that has all of the essential tools that you need in your business that will make your life easier and put more money in your pocket. It's that simple. Everyday we ask ourselves how we can harness technology to deliver real value to you in your business. Late last year we even surveyed our growing subscriberer base to find out what you felt would make this a better application for your business.
We learned alot from that survey and we have listened! Below is a preview of what we have coming within the next few months. As you will see there are a number of great new features and tools that we hope truly will deliver on our mantra and that is to give you:
More TIME to spend in front of clients and prospects
- More MONEY as a result of satisfied/loyal clients and more targeted selling efforts
- More CONTROL over your business and personal life
What's coming the first half of 2009?
PLEASE NOTE: All system enhancements listed below will be available to you at no additonal charge to our currently low prices.
In March we unveiled our new Client Support Center. We offer several new self-help tools like our new knowledge-base that contains dozens of frequently asked questions, downloads for the system, and dozens of 30 second feature videos that can walk you through a quick overview of how any feature works. We asked ourselves "Why stop there", so we now offer LIVE Chat Support (M-F 9am - 5pm EST) to give you instant feedback to any questions or issues you may have.
Two-way Outlook Synchronization plug-in . This plug-in will be something that a user will download from our site, and you will now be able to keep all contacts, and calendar events synchronized. Any work that you do while offline in Outlook will automatically synchronize to Big Contacts the next time you are back online.
New Marketing Module. This will replace the “Auto-Pilot” tab and create an entire marketing suite for you to use to stay in touch with your clients and to more effortlessly and effectively market to your prospects. This new module will include:
- Our Current Sales Pipeline Drip Marketing Manager
- A New Email Campaign Manager complete with reports and analytics that will integrate directly with our system and feed campaign data directly to each contact record.
- In a future release (later in 2009), weoffer a complete Direct Mail Campaign Manager. You will be able to develop a number of campaigns using any combination of these direct mail pieces (Postcards, Letters, Flyers, Certified Mail, and Booklets)
GREATLY Enhanced Business Contact Record. This new contact record will allow you to create a business contact record and then add as many individual contacts to that contact record as you like. As a matter of fact all communication/ history in that contact record will be organized by individual contact so that you will know who you spoke to, about what and when.
iPhone application, and later this year a Blackberry application will be released on the newly formed Blackberry app store that they are calling "Blackberry App World". These applications will give you true mobile office capabilities. For more information on what you will be able to do through this new application, feel free to give us a call at 1-888-286-6578 Ext. 701.
Enhanced Email Module. Enhancements will include advanced features that will ensure proper identification with email providers to prevent being categorized as a spam, and the ability to reply directly to emails from within the Big Contacts application. All this will allow you to easily maintain all email history within each contact record.
Enhanced Calendar. We will be moving this to its own tab so that we will have plenty of room for enhancements. Enhancements will include better, more detailed calendar views, customizable alerts and alarms, customizable reminders for the prospect and client via email and text message.
Enhanced Reports Module. We will be adding more data fields that can be searched - with the goal being that we have all fields in the database in the reports area where one can search. We already allow you to set up your own Custom reports, and now you will be able to set up a delivery schedule for reports that you wish to periodically generate. These scheduled reports will run in their appropriate intervals and will be directly emailed to your inbox for your review.
As you can see, we are working very hard to deliver the most functional platform in the industry. We hope you find that these latest additions will make a measurable difference in your business.
Here's to a great 2009!