Interfacing The Goldmine business Contact Manager
With Your Website or
(Using Goldmine Web Import for fun and Profit)
by Bill Mee
Almost every website that is connected with either and on or offline business needs to gather leads, contact information or other pertinent data from prospects and customers.
Once a prospect or customer's contact information is obtained you need a consistent and reliable strategy for following up and tracking that data until the prospect makes a purchase or an existing customer makes additional purchases.
FrontRange Solutions, Inc. Goldmine Business Contact Manager is one of the most powerful and cost effective tools for managing prospects and customers both pre and post sale. Goldmine supports a very powerful feature that allows the direct importation of data into the Godmine Contact database. When this data arrives in the form of specially formatted e-mail message a new contact record is automatically created and the respective data fields populated.
If your website supports server side scripting languages such as Active Server Pages or Cold Fusion and you have programmatic access to your ISP's mailserver you can easily create a script that automatically emails a Goldmine Import record to the In Box of the Goldmine Business Contact Manager. If your website collects a lot of contact information this can be a very time saving device since it makes it unnecessary to manually enter each new contact as they are sent to you. Many websites use cgi scripts to mail the contents of the contact form to the webmaster's email as they are collected. By utilizing automatic record import and creation this can really streamline a business.
When your server side script creates the Goldmine Web Import email it can simultaneously send an autoresponding thank you note back to the prospect submitting the contact form and send an email notification to a salesperson. Godlmine Web Import records are very powerful tools. When formatting the record you can set key fields in Goldmine such as the Industy Type, Interest and Source field. Therefore, if the prospect is requesting information from one of several of a company's websites on a particular subject this data can be correctly set in the contact's Goldmine record. This is very helpful later on because Goldmine allows you to create filters that will sort records into groups based on specific criteria. For instance if the Source field is set to Web and the Interest field is set to New Homes on a real estate site the business could perform a record sort on all contacts that had come in from the web who were interested in new homes and then send this group a promotional offer or brochure.
When the relatively small investment (<$300 per user license) in Goldmine Business contact Manager is coupled with the data collection mechanism of your website a very powerful highly automated sales and marketing system can be realized. Your website can collect prospect information and your Business Contact Manager can do the hard work of regularly following up with prospects and customers. This definitely fits the definition of "working smarter and not harder".
If your website gives away something free in return for prospects providing their name and email address there needs to be a way to follow up with that prospect on a regular basis until they become a customer. If you have obtained your prospect's contact information from a "Contact Us" or "Request more Information" web page there needs to be a means of getting this data into a system that will allow follow-up and tracking of the lead.
