What Went Wrong with the Mailing

416-621-9348 cgreaves@chrisgreaves.com
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What Went Wrong with the Mailing?

(8) Partway through the final fold-and-stuff I realized that I wasn’t going to mail to people I’d neither met nor talked to. That left me with a pile of unusable letters and envelopes. I was going to mark and modify the mailed records in my contact database as I completed the envelopes.

Next Time: Mark the candidates for mailing first, then export from the contact database only those records for the mail merge run.

My contact database maintains a “Date Last Modified” field. Whenever I make a change to a record, the date last Modified field is updated.

This is great for times when I have made a voice, email or direct contact, but sometimes I think that I don’t want to count it as a contact when I am merely correcting a typing error, or fixing a wonky telephone format or postal code field.

However, mailing an invitation or a letter to a contact certainly counts as a modification, so it makes sense to work my way through the database marking (with “Mailed Flyer September 15, 2010”) and updating the date last Modified field. Each record can be tagged either in a special tag field, or just in the memo/comments field.

Once I’ve inspected each record and marked it as “mailed” (although it isn’t yet mailed!) I can then extract just the records so tagged and export them to my CSV file.

Toronto and Mississauga, Sunday, December 05, 2010 3:27 PM