5 Contact Management Tips to Make Your Business More Productive

Proper contact management is essential to keep your company productive and organized. But while technology offers myriad solutions to effectively manage contacts on a large scale, your contacts can get messy very quickly without good processes.

Without proper planning, centralized management, and automated synchronization, contacts are distributed across multiple email accounts and other databases. If your contact management processes fail, some team members may be tempted to go back to paper or DIY solutions and jot down contacts on sticky notes where they inevitably get lost or misplaced.

With the extra work it takes to find the right data and clean things up, this isn’t a recipe for productivity for anyone.

Fortunately, with the optimal mix of process and technology, you can improve access to this business-critical information across the board.

Here are five tips for improving your company’s contact management systems for smooth operations, productivity, and reliability.

Contact management best practices

1. Clean up your data.

The digital universe is huge and doubles every two years. However, much of this data is of no use to anyone.

With so-called big data, the biggest challenge is figuring out which data is valuable and which is not. When it comes to managing your contacts, bad data includes data that doesn’t help you get the right message across through the right channels.

Examples of this were duplicate, outdated or incorrect contact data as well as contact data that you should not keep due to data protection laws such as the GDPR. Because of this, you need to make sure that your contact information is properly sanitized and organized before making any major changes to your contact management processes.

For organizations with thousands of contacts, it is virtually impossible to manually purge contact information. Instead, you need an intelligent system to unify multiple data sources and remove duplicate, incorrect, or outdated information.

Merging contacts without losing important data is particularly important, which you can achieve by intelligently synchronizing different databases while enriching the contact records instead of storing information from just one source.

2. Use a centralized database.

Contact details play a crucial role in every department of every company. The challenge is that different departments collect contact information in different ways.

Sales teams usually organize their data in a CRM, while marketers collect data like email addresses through lead gen apps and email marketing platforms. Other departments such as HR and Support also have their own contact management systems.

Contact management becomes exponentially more complicated in larger organizations when different offices use different tools and platforms that don’t always work well together.

To solve these problems, you need a centralized database that all the right people can access.

For very small businesses, a digital address book like Google Contacts or Microsoft Outlook may be fine, but it won’t work for larger businesses.

When you have dozens or even hundreds of employees, it’s easy to have your contacts spread across multiple applications. Therefore, a cloud-based CRM like HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce is required as the central source of truth in your tech stack.

But CRM itself doesn’t necessarily solve the problem – you need to keep all of your data in sync by setting up the necessary app integrations between your CRM and the rest of the business tools.

3. Segment your contacts.

Unless your organization has a very niche audience, there’s no point sending the same message to everyone on your mailing list. Even if your company covers a broadly similar demographic, you may still need to group contacts into existing customers, leads, internal contacts, suppliers, partners, and so on.

Audience segmentation is one of the most powerful tactics for email marketing. Segmenting your mailing lists and using personalization increases open rates, click rates, and conversions simply because the email is more relevant to your audience.

The optimal way to segment your mailing list depends entirely on your business and the types of people it is targeted at. For example, you can send tailored newsletters to your audience with blog posts that are more relevant to them based on their interests or previous interactions with you.

Some companies segment their lists based on demographics. Others group their audiences based on when, where, and how they signed up. Others are aimed at people who have already purchased a particular product or added it to their wish-list. You can also use a combination of these tactics, whichever works best for you.

4. Prioritize security.

Protecting your contact information and your customers’ trust in you is one of the most important aspects of contact management.

Even if data such as names and email addresses are not always considered sensitive information, they are absolutely subject to data protection laws such as GDPR or CCPA.

This means that you must take all necessary steps to prevent your mailing lists from being exposed to spammers and cybercriminals – and only use the data you have in a way that your customers have expressly consented to.

You must also implement an opt-in whereby subscribers give you explicit permission to send various types of email, including marketing communications. All major email marketing platforms – such as Mailchimp or SendGrid – fully comply with data protection regulations.

Not only will this help you stay on the right side of the law, but it will also help you build a high quality mailing list of contacts who will actually want to hear from you. Trust, security, and privacy should be an integral part of your contact management strategy from the start.

5. Synchronize your data.

Maintaining customer data through a variety of cloud-based apps and services can be a daunting task. But a centralized and synchronized database solves that.

While it’s always a good idea to limit the number of apps you use in your business to only the tools necessary to get the job done, you will likely still have dozens of tools around you.

For example, you can use Mailchimp to run your email marketing campaigns, HubSpot for your CRM, Zendesk for customer care, and ClickSend for SMS marketing. All of these apps collect contact information in different ways, so you end up with many different databases that will take a lot of time to manage separately.

Automated contact synchronization keeps everything under control between your business applications and devices. It does this by synchronizing the right data between all of your business tools.

This also helps you maintain a central database where all of your contacts are available for anyone who needs them. By synchronizing your apps, you give every team in your company easy access to important data. This allows employees to focus more on strategic tasks and stay productive instead of spending their time on tedious and repetitive manual processes.