Management Skills

Do you receive marketing letters addressing you directly or generic ones. If you own a small business and have a large mailing list, do you send custom letters or the generic ones that hit the bin quickly? By customizing your mass marketing, whether it is a letter or an email, you are showing your customers that you care.

By customizing I am not just talking about putting their name at the top. You can also have other information. At Christmas, I write a custom paragraph for each of my clients for their Christmas letter. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word in both the same version ie Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Word 2003.

In outlook you can have a folder or use categories to separate your contacts for a mail merge. When you merge them you can use the fields within the contact card to customize your document. So if you want a custom paragraph or say the credit limit then use the fields that are already in the contact card. Then insert them into the document.

Remember to always preview the document, never merge to the printer. The number of times I have merged to a printer to have the printer jam (most back in the days of dot matrix printer where a jam might be the paper ran off the tracks) and then lose several documents.

So remember to merge to a new document, then take a look at all pages to make sure that none need to be adjusted before printing. These are all the mistakes I have made, please learn from me.

Katherine Davison
Business Software Trainer and Consultant
http://www.KatherineDavison.co.uk
http://www.EpiphanyTraining.co.uk

Katherine has been training in the corporate world for 10 years both with training companies and direct for clients.

“I found Katherine to be an excellent trainer – she was extremely patient (even when asked the same questions numerous times). She carried out the training sessions with a sense of humour and I cannot fault her method of training or her presentations” Maureen from Taylor Wessing LLP

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