This week’s blog post is for Marketing managers, or really anyone who manages an e-mailing list using GoldMine.

The fine tuning process for using e-mail mergecodes requires some policy setting and some learning, but it allows you to manage outgoing e-mail mass-communications very well.  Ask your VAR or ask us to help you set up your specific policies and procedures.  Maybe, by now, you’re already familiar with this process in GoldMine, but find it cumbersome to manage mergecodes.  That’s where MasterMine comes in.

Put simply, you want e-mails that are for specific purposes (i.e. your customer newsletter) to go to all of the target accounts (say, your active  and past customers) but not necessarily to all e-mails at those accounts (i.e. not the President or accounting department, in case you have e-mail addresses for them for purposes other than marketing or customer service).  You want your customer newsletter to go to the specific people who can benefit from it.

GoldMine allows you to manage the target recipients for your mass e-mails inclusively via “Merge Codes”.  Put simply, if a targetted account has an e-mail address with “A” in the mergecodes, and you specify “Limit to e-mail merge code:  A” when setting up your mass-e-mail, the e-mail will be sent to that address.

The process is something like this:
0) (ongoing preparation) GoldMine users routinely enter codes that qualify e-mail addresses to receive certain categories of e-mail (i.e. marketing)
1) Create a filter or group to determine the body of accounts that will be targetted.
2) Within that body of accounts, determine whether to send only to the primary contact, or to secondary contacts as well.
3) Specify merge codes to look for within each e-mail address record to qualify it to receive the message.

In this instance, all contacts, both primary and additional, in the filter “Active Customers” will receive the e-mail IF AND ONLY IF they have an “A” somewhere in the mergecodes field of their e-mail address.

What quickly becomes apparent is that you have no way of checking the accuracy or completeness of your list of records whose e-mail address mergecodes contain “A”.  That is, unless you have MasterMine.

And you have no practical way to mass-manage those e-mail mergecodes, unless you have MasterMine and MMUpdater.

You can see an example of updating email merge codes in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of each week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.