(MC-1) Working with Contact Details
What are Contacts?
A contact is where a person's information is kept. The people in Contacts do not have to be attendees to any of your activities, however people that book onto them will be added to your contacts automatically. A contact includes the following parts:
The name of the person, including what they like to be known as.
Their contact details, such as their email address and their phone number.
Personal information, such as the contact's gender and age.
The area in which they are located, which can be used to send targeted emails to contacts from certain areas.
Contact tags, which can be used to categorise your contacts in different ways, for example where you met them or the types of activities they may be most interested in.
Notes which you can keep about your interactions with an individual contact.
The Contacts Area
To go to the Contacts area:
The Contacts area is laid out with search functions on the left, and the details of either an individual contact or a list of contacts on the right.
A contact record is either a Test Mode contact or a Live Mode contact, so set the Test/Live switch according to the contacts you want to see.
When you first sign up for the app, there are 65 test mode demo contacts pre-installed, and no live mode contacts.
To view the details of a specific contact:
Their details appear on the right hand side:
To update a contact's record:
To add a new contact:
A blank contact record appears on the right hand side.
After you have initially saved the contact, then the other local menu items will appear allowing you to record notes and create invoices.
Understanding the Contact Fields
There are lots of fields in a contact record, and you only need to fill in the name and email fields to have a functioning record.
Let's go through each of the fields so you are clear on exactly what they should contain and how that information is used...
Name Fields
"First name" and "Last name" perform as you would expect.
The "Known As" field can be entered if the contact wishes to be called something different to their given first name. So for example, if the test contact Natasha Neilson is generally known as "Nat" you can add "Nat" in the "Known as" field and it will be used as follows:
Where you expect their first name to be used, for example in a message which accesses a contact's [First Name], then "Nat" will be used instead of "Natasha".
In situations where the full name may be used, the "Known as" element will be added in brackets at the end, so in our example: "Natasha Neilson (Nat)".
Contact Information Fields
The "Email" field performs as you would expect.
The "Mobile Phone" field is used to send SMS messages. You should ensure that for any contacts outside of your own country, you use the international format for their mobile phone number, starting with "+", so for example "+1" for the USA, "+44" for the UK, or "+34" for Spain. Try searching for "international phone number format" in a search engine if you need more information about this.
The "Other Phone" field can be used to record any other phone numbers. Here you can use any format and text you choose as the number is not used in any message sending.
Categorisation Fields
Gender: select the contact's gender from the list, and add your own options as you choose.
Tags: you can create your own key words as tags to reference a certain group of contacts. For example, if you meet 10 contacts at an event and want to send them a follow-up email, give them each a tag referencing the event name and then search for that tag to send the email. You can give an individual contact any number of tags.
Location: enter any text here to reference where your contact lives in terms of just a town and country, rather than their full address. This can be really helpful in understanding how people may be travelling to your activities.
Regions: You may hold your activities in different places which are a long way apart. You can define these places as "Regions" and label your contracts in terms of which regions they would travel to in order to attend an activity. So for example, if you hold one hour yoga classes in both London and Bristol (150 miles apart), then you would not expect someone in London to travel 150 miles to Bristol for a one hour class. By labelling contacts with a region, you can make your mailings more personal and targeted, increasing your client's sense of trust in your business.
Age Range: capture the age range of your clients if this information could help to make your mailings more targeted or help to understand the demographic of your attendees.
Brands: If you have defined multiple brands (see lesson AF-4) then you can use this field to specify which of your brands a contact is interested in.
The fields Other phone, Address, Location, Gender and Age Range can be populated automatically from the booking form by asking questions which relate to those fields on the booking form. See lesson DA-7 for more details.
Editing Categorisation Options
To edit the categorisation options available, follow the instructions in lesson AF-13.
Summary
We have had an introduction to working with contact records, and looked in detail at how to work with each of the fields in their record.
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