Good morning, Podcast. This is the Path to Warren Podcast. It is July 15th 2020, and the theme of the podcast today is about updating your database and the best way to do that in business. So currently I have self tasked myself with the project. That is pretty exciting, and I found some new techniques that I want to share that I think will help a lot of people. So let me just set the frame of what’s going on and give you a little bit of background story here. So recently we created an ebook from about twelve blogs from one of our experts. And from creating this ebook, we needed to distribute the ebook. We have a database of about 7000 plus people in it, and we have a customer, a standard CRM system where we keep track of the database and notes from customers and notes on customers and things like that. It’s just your standard customer service customer resource database. And that system is called ClaritySoft. That’s what we use. It does a pretty good job. We also use Constant Contacts as a way of sending out mass emails. And it really has some features when it comes to tracking who opened what. It really has some great advantages that we find is very helpful. So just to recap, I’ve got the Constant Contacts, I’ve got ClaritySoft, and then we have inside of ClaritySoft, this 7000 client database that really is like the hub of where all this information about the clients are held. What I learned over the last couple weeks is that as a client switches jobs and they’re now working for a new company, their email address obviously is no longer working. So it bounces back as undeliverable and it bounces back and never makes it to the client because they’ve switched jobs. This is pretty standard, right? Well, over the last couple of years, there’s not been anybody searching and finding out where these clients have gone and tracking them down. So when it came time to send out this ebook and let everybody know where to find this ebook, I was really excited about it. Our marketing coordinator in our office and I finished editing the ebook right at the about 3:30PM on a Thursday. Well, this just wasn’t any Thursday. This was July 2, not too long ago. This is July 2, and we were tasked with really trying to finish this ebook up. There were two photos that were a little blurry. So we worked until about 3:30pm on that Thursday, July 2, to finish it and understand that July 4 is on a Saturday. So July 3 is pretty much a national holiday. Everybody in their brother is off on July 3 on that Friday. So here on the second on a Thursday around 3:30. I finished up editing this book with our marketing coordinator, who’s got skills and InDesign software. And I said, hey, I’d like to start sending this out. Are you okay with me starting to send this out. She said yeah it’s good to go. Wonderful. So around 4:00pm in the afternoon I got really excited and it was like oh man, it’s ready to go. So in my head I thought about sending it to about 20 or 30 people just to kind of see engage what the response would be. And my plan was to just send an email and blind carbon copy these 30 people in like a blind carbon copy and send the email to myself and have all their email addresses hidden in the BCC line and have this link to the ebook there. Well as I started to create the email I sent it to my boss and he gave me feedback on what he would change and edit from my email. But in there I said please enjoy this ebook and I hope everyone has a wonderful 4 July. It was really wishing them a great weekend and kind of like if you want to have some reading material over the weekend, feel free to look at this ebook. It was just a great reason. It was like an excuse to send out this ebook. So around 4:00pm I had this email ready to go. I sent it around 4:30pm, I had the edits back from my boss and I decided while I was waiting on him to make his edits, went into Constant Contacts and exported all of the email addresses that I had and I was trying to figure out who I’m going to send them to. Well he responded back with just a simple edit to one part of the email. In my draft email he only had one edit and he didn’t say anything about Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, I don’t think we could send this out before. I don’t think we should send this out before the holidays. He didn’t say any of that, he just edited and wanted me to edit one part of the email. I was like well man, maybe he thinks this is a great idea, maybe he’s okay with me sending this to everybody. So I proceeded to get this Excel document after I exported it out of ClaritySoft or out of Constant Contacts that had all these email addresses. And so I had heard that you want to not send more than 50 email addresses at a time. You don’t want to send an email with more than 50 email addresses. That’s the ideal number that a lot of these companies have for size. A lot of their servers will bounce it back and reject it if it has more than 50 or the two part of the email. 50 is the key number. So I try to get it around 48 or so well because we had 7000 emails and my wife was planning on going to the beach that night so I didn’t need to work until 8:00pm at night sending out these emails, decided to send them in batches of like 200 people per email. So what I did was I have a little system for having the Excel spreadsheet on the right side of my screen and I would go down it and I would grab you could see as you highlight 50 emails or 200 emails as you’re highlighting those, it says on the bottom of Excel on the bottom line, how many emails you’ve got there or how many sales that you’ve highlighted. It keeps track of that. So once it reaches about 200, I stop, hit the right button, hit copy, then go over to my Outlook email and I go into the blind carbon copy and I hit paste. So all 50 of those emails popped up there and the “Too” section, I had my email address. So it looks like I’m sending it to myself. That’s just standard for blind carbon copy. And I hit send and then I would go back to that Excel spreadsheet and the part that’s already highlighted from the 50 or 200 that I just sent to, that part is going to be already highlighted. I would go to the button where it changes the text color. I changed that to red. Red means I’ve already sent it to them. That’s just my little code for trying to not send two emails to the same people. And then I grabbed the next 50 go over, paste it into the blind carbon copy. And of course I’m sending the same email out to the same like, I send it the same email out to all these people. So I have in the sent folder, I go to my sent mail and I’ll find the email I just sent out, I’ll hit forward and then I’ll take the next 50 people, drop it into the blind carbon copy, Put in the Too, put my email address, delete this part in the subject line. It’s going to say forward. Like I’m forwarding it, I’m going to delete that so that it appears that it’s the original email. And then I’ll delete the in the body of the email. I’ll delete the first little part that shows that it was a forwarded email. So it looks like a fresh brand new email and I’ll paste those 50 new people or 200 new people, whatever, and then hit send, go back to the Excel spreadsheet, change the font color of those email addresses to red so that I know that I’ve sent it to those people and I just keep doing that until I get to the bottom of this email spreadsheet list and everybody’s red that’s my way of getting it out to everybody. So what happens when you send it from your Outlook? When I was sending it from my Outlook, I was watching on the left column of my Outlook where it shows the inbox. And every time I was sending an email, I would get these automatic replies and I would get these bounces back because I sent out these emails to 50 people and ten of them bounced back right away because they had an auto reply message on them. What I did was I started sending the messages after 5:00PM. So like 5:05PM all the way and I didn’t finish until about 5:30PM. But from 5:05 and to 5:30, 95% of the people I would say 95%. But if somebody’s going to have an away message up, they’re going to put the away message up after 05:00pm. As they walked out the door, 05:00pm, they were hitting that away message. So I was able to capture these away messages. And why are away messages so important? Away messages on July 2, knowing that they’re going into a day off on July 3, most of our clients would have, hey, contact my associate at this email address and this phone number. If you have something urgent, I’m on vacation or I’m off tomorrow. Reach out to my boss. Here’s my supervisor’s email address. And so what that did was that allowed me to get all of these other contacts to update our system and then in their auto replies. A lot of times these people have email signatures so I was able to capture their email signatures which had all of their job titles, their updated addresses and things like that. All the data that I haven’t been able to capture before. So this is where I want to stop it today. But this is like a backstory of how to update these contacts in the most efficient way. Stay tuned. In the next episode I’m going to talk about how to do it. But what happened was out of the 7000 email addresses that I sent or emails that I sent, there were 1700 that were in my inbox from auto replies and also from emails that bounced back and didn’t work anymore that had been accumulating over the years. And there were also just straight up undeliverable emails that were fresh. So I’m going to talk about how to deal with all those there were 1700 of them and I figured out a way now to handle them in the most efficient way to find out where they are, find out where the client went to get their updated information and get them back into the system so that we can continue to stay in front of them. Thanks so much for sharing this podcast. If you liked it, hit subscribe and share it with a friend. We’ll see you on the next one. Make a contribution today. Thanks. Have a great day.