Managing Contacts and Distribution Lists
For anyone that has worked with me, you know I’m a big fan of Microsoft Outlook. It seems like a strange statement for someone that’s always downloading the latest to-do app, thinks deeply about the best way to track to do items on a legal pad in a meeting, and lives off Google Calendar. In a separate post, I may go into why I love Outlook so much, but for the purposes of this post, the key thing to know is that I’m obsessed with digital organization structures that are:
- Easy to maintain
- Never require double data entry
- Don’t require you to remember to do something
In this post, I’ll explain how I keep to those principles when it comes to organizing contacts, and then leveraging those contacts for email distribution lists.
As with others who have recently left government or transitioned jobs. I find myself with .vcf contact archive files, excel exports of emails, invites to Google Docs where folks are sharing contact info to stay in touch, and piles of business cards.
How to you organize this giant mess of contacts and keep things in sync?
I researched and started free trials of roughly a dozen of the latest contact managements tools, including Google Contacts, Nimble, FullContact, Zoho CRM, Capsule, Close, and Highrise.
I settled on FullContact.
FullContact, in addition to being a Denver-based company, provides the best solution for syncing contacts across your systems, removing duplicates, and pulling info from email signatures, photos of business cards, and changes to a persons online accounts. If you’re an Apple user, FullContact will sync between iCloud and Google Contacts to keep those in sync with each other.
You get 1,000 business card scans as part of a paid account, and it works brilliantly (they contract people to do the transcription in addition to using optical text recognition tools).
FullContact costs $8.99 per month, or $99.99 for a year subscription. https://www.fullcontact.com/
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After your contacts are in sync, what’s the best way to leverage those contacts into quick and easy to use distribution lists?
The use case I kept in mind through this research is, you have a friend heading to New York City, and they’d like to be connected to your colleagues in the civic tech space there. With an ideal system, how quick and easy is it to send an email to those New York colleagues?
I settled on the Chrome extension Mixmax for this solution.
In Google Contacts you can quickly select a group of contacts, and bulk add a “label” to them. Labels are Google Contact’s main way of organizing people. An individual contact can have many labels, like “OSTP, NY, Civic Tech”. If you wanted to group people quickly for an introductory email, you can select them all in Google Contacts, and add a label like “NY Civic Tech”.
One thing to note, you can email this group of recipients directly from Google Contacts. So if you don’t care that the emails are not personalized in a way that mail merge can do, this is by far the easiest option.
After you apply that label, go to Gmail.com using the Chrome web browser. With the Mixmax Chrome extension installed, there is a purple Mixmax logo at the top of Gmail. Click on the logo to open up the Mixmax dashboard.
In the Mixmax dashboard, you go to Sequences on the left pane. Think of sequences like mailing distribution lists.
In the next window, select recipients for your mail merge email. The label you just created in Google Contacts is available as a recipient option.
After selecting the recipients, compose the email using a few variables like {{First Name}}. As you complete the wizard step through process, you’ll be able to hit send on all of the emails from here. After you send from the sequence window, the emails will all appear in Gmail’s sent folder with proper addresses and names filed in for each variable.
Mixmax costs $29/month, or $24/month if billed yearly. It has a 14 day free trial period as well. There are cheaper ways to do mail merge, but all of them have many more steps, involving taking contacts in and out of spreadsheets to set them up. Mixmax takes care of all of those steps, and stays in sync with Google Contacts to make doing this multiple times very easy. It also keeps track of open and click through rates after you’ve sent the email.
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Hopefully this perspective on managing contacts and distribution lists is helpful. Feel free to comment with suggestions to simplify this workflow, or other tools you find useful.
