Does your company host webinars, seminars, workshops or other events throughout the year? Do you have an organized, accurate system in place for capturing and tracking registration information? Does this system require you to manually enter that information into your ACT! database?

We recently hosted a lunch and learn workshop where our guests learned how to use custom ACT! fields and tables, dynamic groups, and the ACT! E-marketing tools to more efficiently organize and track their event details, even eliminating the need for manual entry of registrant information! The guests were amazed at how easy this was to accomplish and marveled at the time it will save them. And they left with our Event Email Marketing Checklist, which provided the step-by-step setup instructions that we use when planning our own events.

If you are interested in learning about how you can more efficiently plan and organize your events, contact us at (847) 520-0860. And don't forget to download our Event Email Marketing Checklist today! We hope you find it useful.

Plus, visit our free ACT! resources page for additional marketing articles and white papers.

We'd love to hear how you use ACT! to plan and organize your events!

Does your company host webinars, seminars, or other events during the year? Did you know that ACT! can be used as an event planner to help you more efficiently organize and track your event details? ACT! has a variety of tools that can be used to ease the process of event coordinating, such as:

• Custom fields and tables - Add custom fields to your layout to track important event information (like contact registration and payment information) and create a custom table to track and display all the details of your various events
• Dynamic groups - Create dynamic groups for each event that will automatically add your event invitees, registrants, and attendees to the pre-defined groups. This is incredibly useful for quickly and easily sending out invites, reminders, and post-event follow-up messages.
• Sage E-Marketing for ACT! (SEMA) - Use SEMA to send out professional event email invites. Review the SEMA email blast reports to help you follow up with contacts who haven't registered but appeared to be interested based on their interactions with your email.
• SEMA Surveys - Create your event registration forms with the easy-to-use SEMA survey tool. Capture all the important registrant information and set each response to map back to an ACT! field - even the custom fields you created - eliminating manual data entry.
• Sage Drip Marketing - Take all of your event email invites, reminders and follow-up messages and add them to a pre-defined campaign series that will automatically send the emails on the dates you tell it to.

Using these ACT! tools can take your event organization to the next level! You can find out more about how to utilize and implement these event planning tools at our upcoming ACT! lunch and learn workshop.

Can't attend? Feel free to call us (847) 520-0860 to learn more today.

We'd love to hear the ACT! tools or tips you've used to help in your event preparations.

Happy New Year! It's that time of year when water cooler chat revolves around the "new year, new you" resolutions. If you resolve to do one thing this year to help boost your business success, choose to build your client loyalty. (Find out the impact that client loyalty has on your business by reading these statistics!) Below I've outlined 5 ACT! tools or database additions that can help you in your mission to create long-term client and customer loyalty.

1. Create a 'Personal' info tab. Record any personal information - favorite sport, hobbies, spouse/children's names, etc. - you learn about a person in your communications with him/her in the personal info tab. Then refer to it when appropriate - ask your client if he's excited about his upcoming fishing trip, or how her daughter did in the dance recital. Remembering little details about a person endears you to them and inches you closer to a customer for life.
2. Schedule monthly birthday/anniversary card blasts. Make it a point to record each client's birthday and/or their anniversary as your client. Then each month, send them cards - or better yet, send them an e-card. E-mail blasts are a great way to consistently communicate with your customers, which leads to...
3. Consider an ACT! E-marketing (aka Swiftpage) subscription for the fast, easy, reliable emailing of all your e-cards, new product/service announcements, special promotions, monthly e-newsletters and more. Consistent, thoughtful communications help establish you as a company they like and can trust.
4. Use the ACT! Activity Series tool (or for ACT! 2011 users, the ACT! Smart Tasks tool), to schedule a pre-defined series of activities, such as birthday reminders, closed opportunity follow-ups, new client welcome campaigns, and more. Continually nurture your clients and provide the best customer service for increased loyalty.
5. Take advantage of the ACT! web info tools in ACT! 2010 and 2011. Learn more about your clients and connect with them on LinkedIn, Facebook and more - all without leaving your ACT! database. (Also, you may want to consider subscribing to Sage Business Info Services for ACT! for more detailed client information such as, their company profile, company financials, and company news.)

By taking the time to learn about your clients and their company, along with continuous, consistent "touches" you will establish yourself as not only an industry leader, but a company who cares about your clients and their needs. And in doing so, you will continue to build your life-long customer network.

We'd love to hear from you! What ACT! tools have you used to better build your client/customer relationships?