Send Out Cards – Exporting customers/prospects and ...



Welcome to another video that is part of The Customer Factor training series.

This video discusses an export feature in The Customer Factor that works with Send Out Cards which is a powerful and very effective relationship building system. If you are not a member of Send Out Cards yet, then check out the webpage on your screen right away. It’s an exciting system for your service business that’ll help you gain more jobs, more referrals, and more profits.

If you’re not a member, I would still encourage you to watch this short video anyway.

What we’ve done is create a feature within The Customer Factor that works hand in hand with Send Out Cards.

So let’s get right to it. .

This feature is about the export process and how you can easily export your customers and/or prospects out of The Customer Factor and then import them into the Send Out Cards system. As a quick side note, I worked my prospects almost as hard as my customers when it came to sending out cards and letters regularly. Many of them eventually became customers due to the effort spent on them as far as staying in touch. .

Ok…here we are on the monthly schedule screen. The first thing we do to begin the process, is click on this link here. This hyperlinked # represents every one of your customers in The Customer Factor.

On this Search Results screen, we’ll check this “check all” box at the top or we can scroll down and check it at the bottom.

Now we click on the “Export Selected” button. This’ll take us to our export screen. See this option here? This is specifically for Send Out Cards. When we check it, you’ll notice that the “name”, “address”, “phone(s)”, and “email” boxes check themselves and can’t be changed because this is the info that you want in your Send Out Cards database. We don’t want “Current Jobs” or “Job history” information, if any.

Next we click the “Export” button. A box will open up offering you two choices-to open the file or to save the file. Let’s check the “save” option and click “ok”.

That’s all there is to it. It’s been saved. By default I save files to my desktop.

Now let’s go into my Send Out Cards account.

I’m already logged in. The first thing I do is click on “Manage Groups” so we can set up different groups-one we can call “customers” and one we can name “prospects” if we’re going to be importing prospects into Send Out Cards. Easy enough. You’ll see I’ve already done this.

But assuming I didn’t, we just insert whatever name for our group we want to use and click “Add Group”.

Now let’s go over to the “Contact Manager” link and click on that.

Scrolling down to the bottom, we see a link entitled “Import Contacts”. So we’ll click on that since we are now importing our customers into Send Out Cards that we exported from The Customer Factor.

See this dropdown that says “None”? Let’s leave this set at “none” because we’re making pretend this is our first time importing so we’ll need to set up our profile initially. I’ll explain this further in a minute.

So all we have to do now is browse for the file that we exported from The Customer Factor. Here it is. Let’s highlight it, click “open”, and then the “Upload file” button. This will upload our file of customers into Send Out Cards.

We are next directed to this screen where we can set up our profile. All this means is that we need to let Send Out Cards know what information we are uploading. By the way you only need to set up your profile one time for any prospects and/or customers that we are importing from The Customer Factor.

Well…if you remember back on our export screen inside The Customer Factor, the information in each file is right here-Name, address, phone(s), and email.

Name includes company name if it’s a commercial prospect or customer. And in case of it being commercial, the first and last name is actually the first and last name of the contact person for that company. So it’s important to insert a contact person when adding a commercial prospect or customer into The Customer Factor.

Ok…so back in Send Out Cards, we simply choose all the information that is in the file we just uploaded like first name, last name, company name, address1, city, State, Zip code, Home phone, Work phone, Mobile Phone, Fax, and Email. Country is not in the file so we leave that set as “not in file”. Same thing with “Address 2”, “birth date”, etc. Keep in mind that just because we are selecting the dropdown doesn’t necessarily mean the customer has that information. I mean a customer might not have a work phone for example. That doesn’t matter. Other customers will. So just choose all the proper dropdowns. You’ll see the list on your screen.

Oh…and also if a commercial prospect or customer is in the file that you’re importing, as it says here, the company name does not appear on the envelope. This is another reason why it’s important to make sure you have a contact person assigned to each commercial prospect or customer in The Customer Factor. Otherwise you’ll be sending a card to your commercial prospects and customers with only an address on it.

At the bottom here, we then name our profile. Again...the profile is simply all of this information that we just set in the dropdowns. So we’ll name our profile “Customer Factor” since the importing of prospects and customers is coming from The Customer Factor. Now we’ll click the update profile button.

This shows you a small preview of what’ll be imported. If it all looks good, then we can click the “import entire file” button. Or you can uncheck the box and view your entire list of imported customers. It’s up to you. But I don’t need to do that, so I’ll leave the box checked and click “Import Entire File”.

We’re done. It’ll say “All Records Imported Successfully”. So we just exported all of our customers from The Customer Factor and then imported them all into Send Out Cards.

But now I need to show you what happens if you export again after adding new customers or prospects into The Customer Factor.

So let’s go to the Add Customer screen and add a customer. Harry Brown. Fill in some details and we’ll click “Save”.

And now we want to export again. By the way you don’t need to export each time after adding someone to The Customer Factor. I’m simply showing you what happens if you export using the Send Out Cards export option after someone new is added. But you can export every week, every other week, every month, etc. It doesn’t matter. The Customer Factor will always remember you’re newly added prospects or customers since the last time it was that you exported, whenever that was.

We don’t need to remember anything. So all we do is click this link of total customers again.

Scroll down here and click the “check all” box. Then let’s click the “export selected” button once again. We’re just doing what we did earlier. So we check this “Send Out Cards” radio button and then click the “Export” button down here. The gray box opens up, we save the file, and we’re done exporting. To get an idea what’s about to happen, let’s open the file and you’ll see only harry brown in it even though we exported “all” customers. Again…when choosing this Send Out Cards option on the export screen, The Customer Factor will remember who was previously exported and not export them again.

Ok…now let’s go back over to Send Out Cards. We click the Contact Manager link and scroll down here to import our customers just like we did before.

I do want to point out one thing different that we’ll do now. Remember how we set this dropdown to “none” earlier and we went through the process of setting up our profile? We named it “Customer Factor”, right? So all we need to do now is select Customer Factor from this dropdown here. Disregard the other profile names listed. I was just playing around. But the bottom line is that the profile we previously named was “Customer Factor”, so let’s select it.

We then search for our file just like we did before. Here it is. Since we’re exporting the same file name on the same day, it automatically sticks a 2 after it. So we highlight it, open it, and click “Upload file”.

Now if you’ll notice, all these dropdowns are automatically selected for us. This is because we chose the profile name of “Customer Factor” on the last screen since this was the profile we created before. So Send Out Cards now knows what information is in our file that we’re uploading.

Scrolling down, here is the one customer that I just added to The Customer Factor. So we know that only one customer is being imported into Send Out Cards.

We then click “Import Entire File”. And we are finished. That’s all there is to it.

As I mentioned earlier in this video, if you are not yet a member of Send Out Cards, visit the webpage on your screen now. You’ll be able to read more about it and even be able to check out a walkthrough demonstration where you can send a couple of cards to yourself or anyone you know.

Sure there’s an investment in the system, but you’ll get paid back multiple times over and over again because of the strong relationships you’ll be building with your customers through the use of constant contact. Relationship marketing is one of the most effective ways I know of to grow a service business exponentially. And besides being more profitable, it’s also more fun. I’d much rather work with a referral sent to me from a satisfied customer then a yellow page caller who also contacted 4 of my competitors and is looking for the cheapest price.

So work the relationships. And Send Out Cards is the only system that I know of that can handle it all from beginning to end.

And now that we have the Send Out Cards export feature inside The Customer Factor, you’ll be able to save a huge amount of time when it comes to adding customers and/or prospects into Send Out Cards. No need to manually add anyone. Ever. It’s all automatic with a couple of clicks.

See you in the next video.

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