. list up the people!

You’ve probably never thought about calculating contacts but you do it all the time! Let’s say you’re going to have a meeting. In your head you think; I need to invite Sam and Jill from Marketing, in Engineering I want Mike but definitely not Nick, and finally Matt, Tammy and Sue from production.

There, you are calculating contacts. You chose people from various groups (departments), included some and excluded others. That is how calc{list} works too.

Calc{list} is a list of people: your contacts. The list name defines the group, category, task, activity, or stage people are in. The lists can be combined to make new dynamic lists that automatically calculate to a new group of people.

Take a look at the calc{list} in edit mode below. Notice that the {Newsletter} contains both contacts and other (nested) lists such as {Customers}. Additionally, some lists are marked to indicate how they should be calculated. For example, contacts in {Opt Out} are to be excluded from the final list.

On the right is the {Newsletter} after it has been calculated. The thing to remember is that a calculated list always returns only one instance of a contact. So if a contact is in several of the lists, contained in the edit area, the contact will still only appear once in the final calculated list.

EDIT MODE                                                    CALCULATED

Pretty simple, right? Now let’s dig a little deeper and look at how lists can be Static or Dynamic. If there were only contacts listed in the {Newsletter} edit area the list would be considered static because after calculation the list would never change without re-editing the contacts in the edit area again.

However, our {Newsletter} is dynamic because it contains other nested lists. This is exciting because what this means is that when we add new contacts to the {Customers} list our {Newsletter} list is re-calculate automatically and includes the new contacts. List management has never been this easy!

Are you starting to see how powerful calculating lists can be? Keep exploring, there are many more features to calc{list} with Passive Automation.

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I recently ran across an excellent blog post by Annie Cooley at Swiftpage entitled “Excel- The Ultimate Email List Manager”. She said;

“No matter what type of CRM or contact database you use, Excel can play a crucial role in keeping your email contact lists and campaigns in healthy, working order.

For every campaign you send, survey results you receive, and every single call list you make, you can simply put each set of contacts and results into their own unique spreadsheet. This makes archiving and tracking down specific groups of people, just about as easy as it gets. Essentially creating your own intertwined library of what contacts go with which campaigns and which survey results.”

Annie’s article goes on to explain why email marketers need Excel to help manage their campaigns. Of course Annie, like most, has not yet heard about calc{list}®. And so the myth of “The Ultimate Email List Manager” continues on.

The problem is that Excel was designed for handling numbers and not people! Its claim to fame is letting you do “What If?” numeric calculations. How did it become the de facto standard for email lists?

Calc{list} was designed from the ground up to be a contact list management system. In fact, it lets you calculate contacts! I like to say it lets you do “What Who?” with contacts.

Performing list management in Constant Contact®, iContact and the others is simplistic and tedious at best. That’s why so many have turned to spreadsheets; yet they too struggle with list management.

In future posts we will explore how calc{list} makes it easy to organize, combine and automate email lists. It even assists your entire team with built-in collaboration and workflow; there really is nothing else like it.

So, it’s now time to thank Excel with a nice gold retirement watch and move on to a truly professional contact list management system.

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(Part 1, 2)

So, our goal now is to create two lists, one that targets only the 70% who love jellybeans and another for the 30% who hate jellybeans.

First we’re going to build the {Jellybean Haters} list. We’ll start by importing the contacts that opened the original email into a list called {Opened Jellybeans Promo}. Then we’ll create a new list called {Jellybean Haters} and drag/drop the original {Jellybeans Promo} list and the {Opened Jellybeans Promo} list into it.

Next, here comes the calculating list magic, we will mark the {Opened Jellybeans Promo} list with the “Remove” icon. When we calculate the {Jellybean Haters} list it will include all the people that got the original email but subtract out or remove the people who opened the original email. This leaves us with our jellybean haters!

Ok, that’s a lot to read but here is the shorthand:

{Jellybean Haters} = {Jellybeans Promo} minus {Opened Jellybeans Promo}

or

{Jellybean Haters}
      {Jellybeans Promo}
   – {Opened Jellybeans Promo}

As soon as we create our {Jellybean Follow-Up} list (see below) we are ready to send out our “targeted” follow-up email.

{Jellybean Follow-Up}
      {Jellybeans Promo}
   – {Jellybean Haters} 

Now, now, what do we do with those pesky {Jellybean Haters}? Simple, we’ll just drop them into our {Nut-n-But Brittle Promo} list. After all they did “Opt-In” to our mailing list so they must love some kind of candy.

Hey, maybe I should send out a survey to find out what people like. Yeah, I’ll start with the {Jellybean Haters}…

In reality all these lists could be set up and working in about tem minutes. It’s that easy. Our example has shown just a small sample of what you can do with calculating lists but I’m sure you already see their potential.

Ultimately it’s all about getting relevant content to your targeted audience. So let calc{list} take the pain out of campaign AIM!

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(Part 1)

At this point let’s assume that we have done our due diligence and developed personas for various customer types.

Now we will create lists with names that match our personas and enter the appropriate contacts into those lists. Typically these contacts are imported from the email marketing system or other sources like MS Outlook, etc.

For those who are unfamiliar with a calc{list} list, it is simply a list of contacts with a title assigned. The list of contacts can also contain other lists of contacts (nesting) which will “calculate” to a final list of contacts. The final calculated list of contacts never contains duplicate contacts. (more…)

Let’s make our example company a candy store and we’ll assume we have a list of customers that have joined our mailing list. We want to promote our new jellybean line with a series of emails.

First we create a list in calc{list} called {Jellybeans Promo}. It will be the list of contacts that we send our “Look at our new Jellybeans!” promotional email. Now we will place some of our other lists inside {Jellybeans Promo}.

We’ll drag and drop our persona lists {New Mailing List Members}, {Chewy Candy Lovers} and {Jellybean Customers} into {Jellybeans Promo}. Then calculate the list and we now have the list of contacts we will send our promotion to. Super easy!

After sending our promotional email we had about a 70% open rate, great! So we want to follow up our first email with a second email. But this is where we could go horribly wrong!

Just blasting the second email to the same contacts in the {Jellybeans Promo} list ignores the fact that 30% of these people are not interested in jellybeans. It’s time to add a branch to our campaign and send relative content to each group.

In Part 3 of this series we will conclude our example and explore how calc{list} helps you branch your campaigns for better target marketing.

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Yep, forgetting to aim can cause you to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s easy to get caught up in the technology features of email marketing systems like Constant Contact® and iContact®.

Sure, they make it real easy to send professional emails, newsletters and surveys but this can distract you from focusing on the real needs of your customers or prospects.

Ardath Albee a well known B2B Marketing Strategist (with whom I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging emails) gave a great example of an email campaign going nowhere in her blog titled “Don’t speak AT me, speak WITH me.”

In a B2B world, often it’s more like this:

• I send you an email to tell you about my latest white paper.
• You download the white paper.
• I follow up with a sales pitch.
• You ignore me.
• Next month I send an email to inform you of a product launch.
• You don’t open it.
• Then I send you an invitation to a webinar about some benefit that the new product we launched can deliver. You know, the product launch you didn’t show any interest in.
• You ignore that too.
• So, I send you our company newsletter about our new office building and a customer success story about a company you can’t even relate to.
• Say what? You’re still not speaking with me?

 Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

I had to laugh when I read this tale of horror. I’ve been on the receiving end of that scenario many times. I’m sure your campaigns have never been like this… Or have they?

If they have, Ardath and others recommend that you try to engage and nurture your customers with targeted relevant content.

This is where developing customer personas and segmenting your contact list becomes so important. Organizing your contacts into many different persona lists will help you understand who your customers and prospects are and help you create relevant targeted email campaigns.

It’s here at the contact list management point that you need to shift from your email marketing system to calc{list}®. Email marketing systems advertise list management as one of their features but in reality they offer little more than add, edit and delete capabilities (more here).

Calc{list}, on the other hand, uses unique calculating contact lists that will give you unprecedented control over all your email campaigns. In Part 2 of this series we will explore how you can improve your aim by leveraging persona lists with calc{list}.

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Email marketing has come a long way over the last few years. Gone are the days when a business could just purchase a list of contacts and blast their sales pitch to everyone.

Sending any unsolicited email today gets you quickly labeled as a spammer. It’s not just about sending thousands of emails anymore. If you send me a sales pitch that I didn’t ask for, you’re considered a spammer. It seems a little harsh but it’s part of a backlash from overcrowded in-boxes stuffed with irrelevant messages.

Today growing and managing your contact lists is more important than ever because email marketing is still one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers. So how do we build great contact lists?

To the rescue comes the new breed of “Opt-In” email marketing services like iContact®, Constant Contact® and MailChimp®; and an entirely new way to manage contact lists called calc{list}®.

Permission-based or opt-in email marketing starts by collecting contacts that have requested to be on your mailing list. All of the email marketing services make it easy to create opt-in links on your website, newsletters, blogs, etc.

The important thing is to engage your prospects with content that is meaningful to them. Help them solve a problem. Give them insights that help them run their business better. Your email list will grow the more you engage your audience.

Once you have collected your contacts it is important to segment your contacts into various lists for highly targeted email marketing campaigns. It goes back to the meaningful message to a particular group. This is where calc{list}’s contact list management comes in.

Calc{list} makes it easy to capture, categorize and combine your contacts into an unlimited number of lists that you can synchronize with your favorite email system.  It even has ways to automate the management of your lists.

Every great email campaign starts with a well targeted permission-based contact list. Use an email marketing service combined with good contact list management and you’ll look much better than a cute Chimp!

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Let’s be honest here, if the ability to create contact lists and then add, edit and delete contacts constitutes “list management” then Windows Notepad could be a document management system! That is exactly the type of contact list management offered, even touted, by email marketing websites like Constant Contact®, iContact® and MailChimp®.

Sure Constant Contact and the others have substantially improved the quality of our contact lists by enforcing strict “Opt-In” email standards; and the email delivery feedback is fantastic! But what do we do with all that feedback?  Of course the Autoresponder has dutifully sent our new subscribers the ‘Welcome’ email but now what?

Should the new subscriber be added to any other lists? Should they be contacted by someone and if so who? Should they be placed in a particular marketing persona list or multiple lists?

What if you need to start a new campaign for all of the most recent subscribers plus contacts that responded to last year’s Presidents day sale but exclude the contacts that responded to last year’s Labor day sale? Are you starting to see the need for something more?

A contact list management system should make it easy to manage, compare and combine our contact lists. We need to work on lists as a team so it needs real-time collaboration too. Anything else? How about workflow to make sure everything gets done?

This is exactly the focus of calc{list}® with Passive Automation. It is the first and only program to focus on the problems and opportunities associated with contact list management.

I won’t go into the details or features of calc{list} today, but marketing professionals who are using email marketing websites, contact managers like MS Outlook or spreadsheets to manage contact lists need to stop right now and see what a true Contact List Management system can do. (next…)

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