I’ve been talking about email and email mailing lists for the past few weeks and have another tasty tidbit to share with you. Today let’s talk about how you can clean up your contact lists in Gmail, Office, and Office 365 and keep them updated on an ongoing basis.
The secret weapon is an app I’ve been using for quite a few years called Evercontact. For as little as $5 a month, Evercontact will “keep your address book up-to-date, magically creating new contacts and updating existing ones.”
I don’t know about you but I’m all about having more magic in my life!
How it works is that each time you get a new email Evercontact will extract the contact information from the email signature. If it’s a new contact, Evercontact will create the contact and it if already exists it’ll update the contact data with any new data. You can give Evercontact a try by signing up for a free trial where they will analyze your next 200 incoming emails and make or update the contact info.
If you haven’t been good about creating contacts and keeping them updated in the past, you might be interested in their ContactRescue product that will build your contact list by going back through your past emails for either one year or five years extracting the signatures from the past emails in your inbox.
I recently used ContactRescue to scan and update five years of past emails for me. It scanned 294,983 emails and analyzed 23,645 email signatures. That means that less than ten percent of the emails I receive included an email signature in their message. Not having a signature in your email is a pet peeve of mine. 527 of my contacts were updated. This number would have been larger had I not been already been using Evercontact to create and update contacts as they came in.
Give it a try. You’ll be happy you did.
