It’s the holiday season and the dreaded holiday card mailing is fast approaching. After a game of “not it” – you feel pity for the poor soul who is assigned the task of pulling together a list of contacts from the company database for the annual company holiday card.

It always seems to be the case that in the process of pulling a list, you realize how outdated your contacts are, how many duplicates exist and how many of the contacts are no longer with the companies that they are listed next to.

Using these simple steps, we hope to make this process easier. Think of it as an early present:

1. Collect:

• Import contacts into TrackVia via an Excel Spreadsheet. Click to view a pdf with a step-by-step guide to downloading your Outlook contacts into Excel
• With our new Excel import feature you can easily update (addresses, emails, company names) your existing records

2. Organize:

• If every manager in your office keeps their own list of contacts, easily de-dupe so contacts only receive one card from your corporation
• Add a field in your database of primary contact’s name for your mailing list and then send “tailored messages” signed by the appropriate contact using mail merge
• Track who you sent cards to and who you received cards from by denoting the appropriate fields (card sent/received)
• Upload an html template to create your own look and feel for your holiday greetings
• Create custom views to send tailored messages to your contacts. For example, thank current customers for their business and let prospects and former clients know you look forward to working with them again in the new year

3. Share:

• Mailing – use the mail merge feature to create mailing labels and/or personalized holiday letters for snail mail correspondence without having to perform a difficult mail merge with two different systems
• Electronic – use the mail merge feature to personalize the email with fields from your database and then send the message via the built-in email campaign tool