Most marketers who are using an email marketing provider are probably wondering how anyone sent out newsletters before the advent of e-marketing software.  For ACT! users, Swiftpage, also known as Sage E-marketing for ACT!, has long been the best all-in-one way to both create and instantly send out company newsletters.  But it has the capability to do much more than that.  This week, we wanted to highlight some of the lesser known powers of Swiftpage:


1.  Follow-up
Have you ever sent a quick follow-up email after a call or visit to thank your client or prospect for their interest and to let them know you will be in touch?  With Swiftpage, once you create a template you can save it and reuse it, making it easy for you to send a very professional looking follow-up note just minutes after a phone call.

2.  Invitations
Want to invite your contacts to your next event?  You can send a single template to one contact or one hundred contacts in one send.  To avoid sending emails that sound like a mass mailing, use Swiftpage’s mail merge fields to pull personal details like names and addresses from ACT! into the template.  Your attendees can then RSVP using Swiftpage surveys.

3.  Surveys
Swiftpage surveys are a tool you can use to create forms for your contacts to fill out.  If you are ever looking to collect and organize information from your clients—be it RSVPing to an event or giving feedback, using a survey is simple and effective.  And just like templates, you can save your surveys for later use.

4.  Field Mapping
Once you have gleaned data from your Swiftpage survey, one of the best ways to store the information you gather is to direct it back into ACT!.  Swiftpage is designed so that you can map survey answers to ACT! fields and then sync that information with ACT!, so you can stay organized automatically.  This saves you time otherwise spend re-typing or copy-pasting.

Are you interested in learning more about Swiftpage?  Call us at 847-520-0860 and ask for Tina Brandts, our Swiftpage Certified Consultant.  And if you want to receive details about an exciting, upcoming Swiftpage offer—be sure to open our upcoming August newletter for more details!  Not registered for our newsletter?  Click here.

Have you come up with a creative use for Swiftpage?  Tell us about it in the comments!

Do you send out email blasts to your clients, perhaps using Sage ACT! e-marketing or Swiftpage?  At one point or another, most e-marketers and email blasters will struggle with low click-through rates.  One simple way to improve the text of your emails for better readership is to scrub your emails of buzzwords. 

Easier said than done, right?

But first things first—what are buzzwords?  Buzzwords are words that are overused, sound new and exciting, but have lost much of their meaning due to over application - words like cutting-edge, industry leader, and innovative to name a few. The problem with buzzwords is people have grown so used to seeing them in sales pitch ads that these words have lost the original sense of excitement they were meant to invoke.  Like hitting a written speed bump, the meaninglessness of the word causes less appreciation for the surrounding text.

To help prevent your readers from tuning out, make it a habit of combing your copy for buzzwords before you hit send.

To get a better idea of what words to avoid, check out Wikipedia’s categorized list of buzzwords or Marketing Jive’s top 100 marketing buzzwords for 2011.  Once you are familiar with these terms, it's pretty easy to spot them and switch them out for more descriptive terms.  Yes, on rare occasions a buzzword may be your best word, but making a habit of breaking away from verbal trends can lead to marketing pieces that are fresh and interesting.

Are you new to e-marketing?  Do you use ACT! but not Swiftpage?  Give us a call at 847-520-0860 to get more information or set up a free trial.

Are you stuck with a pet buzzword you can’t vanquish?  Or is there a particular buzzword you can’t bear to read one more time?  Tell us about it in the comments.

As an ACT! user myself, I occasionally find that ACT! has some very rich features that hide in plain sight.  One such example is the Related Tasks menu on the navigation bar.  Nestled between the look-up bar and the navigation buttons on the left side of the screen, the Related Tasks menu changes as you move from screen to screen.  It intuitively provides you with suggestions for the most commonly used functions on that page so you can take fewer steps to accomplish your task.

For instance, when you are in the list view of contact records, it provides shortcuts to View all contacts or Export to Excel.  When you are on the detail view of a company record, it suggests shortcuts to Create a Contact from a Company or Look-up Company Contacts, or my favorite—View Fields Linked to Contacts.  You simply click the shortcut and it launches that task.

Having a one-click path to some of the most frequently used features in ACT! can help save you time.  Take a peek at your Related Tasks menu today and see if including shortcuts into your day makes your life a little easier.

Have you recently discovered a helpful ACT! feature or tool?  Tell us about it in the comments.