Sending out your email newsletter can be a daunting task, which is why many companies either outsource it, or don't do it very often. However, with the right tools, and following the right protocol, you can take the nightmare out of newsletter.

Your newsletter really should not be stand alone, but complimentary to your website. Your newsletter should be short. It should link to the full story on the website. See our article for more on better newsletters.

Just like email, you can also broadcast faxes and SMS messages to your clients. We can also help you to set up mail merge printing of labels, and Word document letters to clients - from your contact database.

Pilot is a database consultancy. We can connect your contact list to anything. Just contact us and tell us what you need.

CRM stands for customer (or contact) relationship management. Most companies - even very large ones with multi-million dollar CRM systems - do a poor job of actually managing their contacts in a way that makes any sense to the actual contact.

One premis is that everyone within your organisation should be using the same master contact list. In reality, in most companies there are pools of contact data which are being replicated and mis-managed.

Obviously the newsletter contact list needs to be up-to-date, and purged of all the dead data. If you are having difficulty with this then may be we can help.

We can help to:

• rationalise your contact lists, to keep them current, and mastered in one place

• set up your website to collect profiled newsletter sign ups

• set up your website to manage un-subscriptions

• set you up with a simple process to manage day-to-day input of business cards into your contact list

Pilot is a database consultancy. This is what we do. If you are having problems, give us a call.