Using Outlook 2003 to manage your Contacts – 7 Keys to Success

Feature Outlook Productivity Tip:

One of the most common questions we get is "How can I use Outlook to manage my business contacts? Well, below we've put together 7 simple steps or keys that will help you to better utilize the program you're more than likely in most of the day anyway...Outlook.

There are 7 easy steps to use when you want to manage your contacts within Outlook.

1. Storing Customer Email Addresses - The First Step
2. Views - Built-in ways to see contact data
3. Categories - Keywords for identification
4. Actions Menu - The best way to start stuff
5. Contacts Link field in Outlook items
6. Activities Tab - What's in there anyway?
7. Mail Merging Techniques

Let's go into them in more detail.

1. Storing Customer Email Addresses - The First Step -- Outlook can store up to three email addresses for your contacts. This is the hidden key to tracking contact relations
2. Views - Built-in ways to see contact data -- Using views will allow you to pull information out. Viewing by Company allows you to see all contacts you have that work for the same company. Viewing by Flag Status allows you to see all contacts you have set a follow up flag for. Similar to a tickler system.
3. Categories - Keywords for identification -- Use one or more default Categories or add your own custom Categories. Viewing by Category allows you to see all contacts grouped by categories. If you utilize Categories, this view will allow you to do so many things with your contacts.
4. Actions Menu - The best way to start stuff -- The best place to start relating correspondence and other items to a contact is by using the Actions menu in each contact record. Notice all the things you can associate with a contact from this menu. When started from here, these items are automatically linked to the contact record.
5. Contacts Link field in Outlook items -- Another thing you can do with the Contacts field is to associate contacts with other contacts. What if you have an existing appointment item and you want to associate it with a contact. Just click on the Contacts link button.
6. Activities Tab - What's in there anyway? -- Click the Activities tab on any contact record. The Activities tab automatically looks for related items in all of your default folders. You can also customize the Activities tab settings to look in other Outlook folders as well. You can also see only the email items, both email you received and email you sent.
7. Mail Merging Techniques -- Using Categories is an easy way to identify contacts you want to perform a mail merge on. Once you have followed the mail merge process in Word, you'll be able to see what the letters will look like. Each contact receives their own email which has their individual email address in the To field. No need to BCC. The Activities tab shows you how each contact that you performed a mail merge on has an individual letter record associated to it. This is how you use mail merge to create a bulk letter to a large number of contacts, but have the individual item linked to each appropriate contact record.

I welcome your comments at the bottom of this page. How many of you already use Outook to manage your contacts? What other areas of Outlook do you try to use to its fullest capabilty? Many people only use the email part of Outlook and not much more, but Outlook can really help you manage many parts of your business and personal lives.