CRM & Mail Merge
I’ve had MS Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager for a while now but never really got the hang of using it. I understand ACT! is the top seller in this category, so I tried using it many months ago and didn’t like it much either. Just the other day I downloaded the new version and tried it again.
I’m in the middle of a campaign that sends a series of 3 letters to a rented list of cold prospects (suspects). I did the first mailing using Word 2007 mail merge to an Excel file. It worked like a champ. I decided to try tracking the campaign in Outlook’s BCM. It seemed fine at first, but when I went to “track” the results it kept telling me that the person no longer exists (something to do with using an “external” list).
For the second letter, I imported the list into ACT! 2008 and did the mail merge. It created a Word document that was 321 pages long! It was a 3 page letter and I print on both sides of the page, so when it hit page 4 (the beginning of the second letter), it was on the back of the 3rd page of the previous letter. In order to make that work, I’d have to print pages 1-3, then pages 4-6, 7-9, etc… I went back to Word/Excel and it worked like a champ again.
For the third letter, I created a new Outlook profile and imported the data. Now it lets me track the campaign and do the mail merge properly with Word, but I can’t sort by different fields before I send the job. I also found out that during the import that if there is no contact name (only a business name), it uses the business name as the “full name” instead of leaving it blank, so the conditional statement “if firstname = null then greeting line = Dear Sir or Madam,” won’t work and it messes up the greetings!
AARGH!! Why is this so hard? If anyone has ideas, I’m willing to listen. I use MS Office 2007 Pro including Accounting (switched from Quickbooks about a year ago) and Business Contact Manager. It seems like the good old fashion manual way of doing a mail merge is the only thing that’s working for me. Maybe I need to look at an online solution?
Tags: ACT! 2008, CRM, mail merge, Office 2007