Business Administrator possesses a wealth of facilities to support marketing over a range of communication types. From its ability to import contacts en-masse, to its ability to send a message to thousands of contacts with incredible ease, you won’t be short of options.
Entering contacts
There are essentially 2 ways to get contacts onto the database.
- Import from an electronic document, where you can import from a file containing contacts, such as a text file or an Excel document
- Fast Contact entry, where you can type in base details about contacts quickly, moving on to the next efficiently
Importing contacts
This is ideal if you buy marketing lists or if you are transferring them from other systems. With this system, however, you are required to offer an expiry date. This is still fine if the contacts are your because you ought to review the contact information periodically to ensure relevance and accuracy.
If the contacts aren't converted to something useful, such as customers, suppliers or staff, then they fall into disuse and willl eventually be removed from the system.
If they are converted, then all notion of removing them is removed. In fact, Business Administrator will not allow removal of customers, suppliers or staff because they form part of your business records.
Fast contact entry
This system applies whether you want to type in the details of one or many contacts. It requires that you only enter base, general information. It's ideal if you find you have to enter contacts from printed lists, or a series of business cards.
Advanced contact editing
Contact entry is supported by their sister system that offers facilities for advanced editing, or the entry of more specialist information. The advanced editor is offered to all contacts whether they are imported or typed, but cannot be used in conjunction with the import system.
If your electronic list of contacts to be imported contains advanced information, we recommend you move to import all the information, and then manually add the information that Business Administrator won't import.
Marketing projects
Project Manager exists to manage the initiatives that businesses have to face. Marketing is among these, and is a specialist system within Project Manager.
In fact, when you import contacts, Business Administrator assumes they are part of a project and requires you to enter the contacts against at least one marketing project.
Stealth Marketing
In addition to managing marketing through a highly toned manager, Project Manager also offers a specialist facility called Stealth Marketing. This facility gives you immense control over a particular marketing project, and tries to present everything you need on-screen at the same time.
Stealth Marketing is highly focused and is designed to put you in a position where you can be highly efficient in a variety of marketing concepts. On first use, it can be confusing because you're presented with lots of information and fast changing commands, in a very responsive environment. It takes a while to get used to, but it means that marketing projects can be kicked off and got underway in a very short time. It's flexibility offers a huge degree of marketing creativity, and is certainly worth the time to get to know.
Stealth Marketing is also ideal if you find yourself frequently sending quick messages to contacts through electronic means.
It also has a natural relationship with BAN network, which means that you can easily market to like minded people that you know, who also use Business Administrator.
Printing stationery
Business Administrator is capable of printing to pre-printed headed paper, or allowing you to create headed paper by being able to place logos and other graphics. With regard to labels, Business Administrator can print logos to labels, but auto-sizes text on the labels, within given bounds. Business Administrator does not have pre-defined label settings, but they are easy for you to set up. For letters, electronic signatures can be imported.
Defining the print area of any printed media is very easy.
You cannot create other marketing materials, such as flyers and pamphlets. Such a role is outside the remit of Business Administrator.
The key roles of the marketing process
- Printing of letters and labels, or emails
- Managing contacts through a marketing project – it presumes that more than one set of letters and labels will be sent
- Recording and managing content of marketing communications
- Managing contact throughput, so that it’s easy to manage a marketing process even if there are thousands of contacts to market to
- Managing bulk email releases so that a release does not block servers
- Monitoring and reporting project budgets, if they apply
Images and Media
On the face of it, images would not appear to have much of a role in business management software, but they are very important to Business Administrator. So much so, that Business Administrator has its own media centre, where it manages a variety of media for everyone. It means that you can use logos, graphics and other images in creating your media.
The BAN network
The Business Administrator Network (BAN) is also a system, or communications channel, available for marketing.
The BAN network comes to play because of the structure of BAWorld ( Business Administrator World ). All Business Administrators can communicate with BAWorld. In fact, they can communicate through it and talk to Business Administrator units in other businesses. Because they can do that, it can provide a channel where humans can talk across the network too.
Which means that you can communicate with with other business people who use the system.
The only rules on the BAN are that you must be invited to know someone before you can communicate with someone, and that decency must prevail. We won't tolerate abuse of the system or abusive behaviour on it.
But once it's going, it's not unlike I'M, though we feel it's easier to use, and you can do a lot more with it. The downside is that it's a little slower, but that is probably good, because it means people don't get wrapped up in long, drawn-out conversations.
Invoice messaging
It is also possible to add titbits of information to invoices when they are sent out. And adding information to them is easy. And a variety of information can be added, some of it directly related to what Business Administrator is doing, which you may be able to capture for positive use It's certainly worth considering.
Contact Manager
Apart from simply storing and reporting on your list of contacts, Contact Manager offers a wealth of facilities. For example, when you've clicked on a contact, you may be able to send a message to hat contact in a variety of forms. Whether or not you can, of through what medium, depends on the information that you've put in the system.
It's easy to send messages by email, through the BAN network or, if you've provided the facilities, ask the computer to dial the phone number for you, in a way that you can record notes on the system. You can also easily add contacts to marketing lists if you want.
CRM - Contact Relations Manager
For every communication you create or receive, Business Administrator expects you to record at least a brief of the conversation. Recording this information is important because, over time, you may want to review how your relationship with the contact has developed, or you may wish to share the information with colleagues that may also be in touch with the contact. It is another system that ought to be used frequently.
IM and VOiP
Some companies use these facilities a lot. Business Administrator doesn't form a relationship with either, but it can launch them, if you tell it where the software is, and it will provide a facility for you to make notes for when the conversation has finished.
Customer analysis
The two main reasons to indulge in marketing are to win new trade and to keep existing trade. Marketing to keep existing trade is by far the easiest and cheapest, and, for that reason, should be reviewed regularly.
The best way to monitor how customer trade is performing is in Business Manager, where you can review a variety of performance charts, particularly those related to customers.
If you find customer performance declining, it's time to react.
But falling performance does not mean your customer is leaving, it could easily mean they are changing the way they work, which means, of course, you should investigate to see how you could benefit. This is only one example of the myriad of reasons why customer performance declines and what you can do about it. And it's all very important marketing.