In MikeCRM family, forms act as information collectors while contacts play a key role in the information collected, because all the information collected is about and around contacts. Deeper understanding of your contacts with sufficient data increases your chance of digging value from them. As an old saying goes, "Know the other and know yourself, you will win every battle". Using the contact management tools provided by MikeCRM, you'll expand and improve your business for knowing much more about your customers. This article is going to introduce MikeCRM Contacts which may benefit you a lot.
What is a contact?
A contact means any person who has connection with you. It could be the "customer" in the customer relationship management, a phone number in your mobile phone address book, an email address in your email contact list, a business card in your business card holder, and a user account in your backend database. A contact may also be your colleague, classmate, relative, friend, VIP, supplier or even a stranger you meet in social networking platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Line etc.
MikeCRM aims to serve SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) with lightweight CRM tools. The contacts mentioned in MikeCRM, in most cases, means your customers or clients. Of course, it doesn't affect you to manage your contacts as other roles simultaneously (such as business partners, and colleagues) since useful tools always help you solve problems.
Why should we manage contacts?
Increase efficiency and find value.
The answer is simple and plain, and that is how CRM works, namely finding trends to create value through highly effective data analysis. What we provide are convenient tools that help you manage your contact data easily. "To do a good job, one must first sharpen one's tools". You will achieve your goal faster if you choose and use suitable tools that fit your actual situation and needs.
What are the sources of contacts?
For contact management tool, the more contacts it handles, the greater value it brings. How to import your contact from different sources to your MikeCRM account? The main methods are listed below:
Add a contact manually
This is the most basic entry. New contact will be simply added just by clicking on the "+ New" button at the top right corner of the Contact Manager page and filling in related contact items in the "New Contact" page.
Import contacts in bulk:
There are several methods to import contacts into your MikeCRM account- from files, email contacts, and other CRM system. Common file types（e.g. CSV, Excel, vCard, WPS, Open Office and Gunumeric) on Windows, Mac and Linux are all supported by MikeCRM. More contact import methods will be available in the near future, so stay tuned.
Create contacts via form:
If you have added contact widgets in your form, contacts will be created automatically with the information filled in the contact widgets. In this way, you could know one contact has already submitted the form through the timeline of the contact.
What elements are included in the Contact Details page?
Contact management is to deal with the information related to contacts. The richer the information is, the closer you know the true demands of your contacts. On the Contact Details page, you can find all the contact information stored, which can be roughly classified into three categories:
Identity information
The police confirm who you are via your ID card or driver's license. In MikeCRM, you are able to confirm one contact via its identity information, including profile information such as name, gender, city, birthdate; occupational information such as job position and company location; contact methods such as email, mobile phone, landline phone and fax; and social networking account information such as Skype, Facebook, Twitter, as well as Instagram.
Managerial information
Managerial information is the additional information that you've added to contact for better management. These additional information include: tags, groups, profile change logs and the notes you've written for the contact. Adding these highly customized information enriches the personality of your contact, which paves the way for later filtering.
Behavioral information
What you've done defines who you are. By recording contacts' activities, behavioral information reflects contact's preference and real needs. In MikeCRM, the timeline of a contact shows you the interactions between you and the contact, consisting of forms the contact has submitted, emails/messages you've sent, and other information like call log that might be included in our future version. What's more, in the Contact Details page, we include all the files uploaded by your contact (e.g. the CV that your contact uploaded through one recruitment form).
How to manage your contacts
Managing contacts is a trivial activity that requires your focus on details. Only by making long-term and continuous efforts to optimize contact information will contact management be fruitful. Managing contacts is not as simple as sorting and filtering contacts in the contact list but requires you to draw vivid and objective portraits of your contacts by constantly updating and maintaining contact information. Commonly-used contact management methods and features in MikeCRM are listed below for your reference:
Regular update and maintenance
The basic requirement for contact management is to update your contact information regularly. For example, update telephone number when it is changed, or add remarks when your contacts experience job hopping. It seems cumbersome and painstaking. In fact, you can use forms to update contact information automatically: push interesting forms to your contacts periodically, encourage them to submit their personal information, and take advantage of every new Submit to update their contact information.
Merge contacts to remove duplicates
If one person has submitted two forms, two contacts will be created automatically. Does it mean there would be full of repeated contacts in your contact list?—don't worry! MikeCRM provides highly effective and simple-to-use feature to merge contacts. With one gentle click, your contact list will be in order, and the scattered information belonging to the same person will be merged into one contact automatically with no need of manual merging.
Tips: If contacts created by different Submits meet the contact automerge rules, these Submits will converge on the timeline of the merged contact, with no need of manual operation.
Star, Group, Tags, and Remarks
Grouping contacts, adding tags, making remarks and starring some contacts are the most frequently-used methods to manage contacts, with which you are able to find contact faster. The four features are not complicated and don't have any fixed usage pattern. Using them with your imagination, you'll benefit more than you've expected.
- Star: the action of "Star" belongs to your individual operation and it'll not affect other members in your MikeCRM organization. So, you may star those contacts who need your closer attention.
- Group: categorizing contacts as groups will ease and streamline contact management. It's really a useful function.
- Tag: you may see tags often coming with group. It will be very suitable and convenient to search for and filter contacts via tags. However, you need to plan in advance about tagging since random tags are useless in contact management.
- Remark: remarks are extended information of contacts. You are able to customize your remarks to include additional contact information such as contacts' VIP level, preferred sports & habits, favorite foods & tastes etc.
Notes & Contact files
Notes: there are two different sources of notes. The first one is plain text added directly to record any information you write down. The other is the notes automatically created by form-submits, namely the question of one widget and its submitted answer are recorded as a note.
Contact files: similar to note, contact files are derived from two ways. The first one is from you, namely you can upload files directly to the Contact Files. The second one is from your contacts, which means the files attached by a contact through forms will be added to the Contact Files.
Timeline
Through timeline, you can see all the information related to the contact in MikeCRM. Timeline is the best feature you can use to know one contact. Currently, timeline consists of four parts:
- Notes: notes in timeline contains those added manually by you and those created automatically by Submits.
- Forms: forms in timeline show which forms the contact has submitted and what content are included in these submits.
- Emails: emails in timeline not only show your email sent history, but also show recipient's reaction towards the email.
- Messages: message sent history is recorded and showed in this part.
Besides, right below the timeline, there is the change logs recording the modification history of the contact information, with which you can keep track of every change towards the contact's profile.
Make the most of your contact resources
Social relations are resources, so are your contacts. MikeCRM not only enables you to add and manage contacts in a simple and effective manner, but also provides EDM and SMS marketing tools, with which you may promote products directly to your contacts.
Search and filter contacts fast
To find out a contact fast, you may search it at the above search box after you've logged in MikeCRM. If you would like to sort out contacts sharing the same characters and manage contacts based on different dimensions and standards, filtering contacts is the best choice. Combining the advantages of contacts search and filter, contacts are on call at any time.
Email & SMS marketing and customer relationship management
If you expect a better performance of email & SMS marketing, you need to send contents that attract and interest customers. The first step to make it is group your contacts in an organized manner and send customized contents to different contact groups. You may use the information you collect from forms to predict the preference of your contacts. For example: your customers who live in Hawaii may not be interested in buying down jacket. Those customers who own a dog may be willing to spend time in pet supplies. You can find more details like the above examples from your contact information collected. A better understanding of your contact information will benefit you more than you've expected.
The Contacts in MikeCRM is not a simple address book but a treasure waiting for you to explore. It's not that difficult to manage customer relationship well with the help of MikeCRM. May you join with MikeCRM to move forward day by day.
