Pinpointe streamlines a number of contact management tools. When you keep your mailing lists organized, you’ll be able to better target your audience, increase your response rate, and receive fewer spam complaints.

Our contact management tools have three parts:

• Databases
  
• Saved Searches
  
• Tagged Lists
  

Here’s how you use them to their fullest.

All your contacts go into one database.

A database is simply a place to store all your contacts. You don’t need to worry about organizing it. Just make sure all the information you need about your contacts is there. Most people gather basic information, like email address, name, physical address, and company. Pinpointe’s stores these for you, using our built-in fields for each contact.

Some people want to add other information, like a contact’s birthday. Pinpointe does this through custom fields. You can add as many custom fields as you’d like. That way, you can build entire customer profiles in your database.

You can choose to email everyone in your database, or just certain people. But resist the urge to create more than one database. If someone ends up in more than one database, you won’t know which database has the correct information. Worse, if that person unsubscribes from one database and not the other, you might mail them email they thought they declined; then you may get reported for spam.

Search your database for people to email.

Instead of creating more than one database, you can search your database for who you want to email. Here are some examples:

• Everyone from California and New York, or any other location.
  
• All the people with incomes higher than $100,000/year.
  
• Anyone who read your last message.
  
• People who clicked on a certain link you emailed them.
  

The number of examples is endless, because you can search on both built-in fields, as well as the custom ones you add. Just put everything you know about customers into your Pinpointe database. The list of names you get back from a search is called a segment - they are a segment of your database.

You don’t need to search your database every time you want those names. Pinpointe lets you create saved searches that will pull those segments when you ask. The beauty of saved searches is when you add people to your database later, if they match the search criteria, they’ll automatically appear from then on. You don’t have to redo your search: your segment is automatically updated.

Tag people to keep them organized.

Many people feel they need more than one database, because they get their contacts from many sources. You might get leads from a website, trade shows, and webinars. Each has their own list of names. So it’s natural to feel they need their own database. We encourage you to resist that instinct for the reasons mentioned above.

Instead, Pinpointe offers tags to organize them. Tags are notes attached to contacts. Without tags, you might have one database for website leads, another for trade shows, and yet another for webinars. Now you can just apply a tag to each contact. You choose what your tags look like.

For example, a tag you create called “website” can flag that user as having come from your website. You also can apply more than one tag. If that website lead also attended a webinar, you can use both “website” and “webinar” tags to flag where they came from.

You can do this by hand. But most of the time, you’ll start by having multiple spreadsheets or lists of names. Pinpointe makes it easy to tag all of them correctly. If your webmaster sends you a spreadsheet with all the website leads, you can import it and have Pinpointe give them all a “website” tag.

That way, if Jane Smith signs up on your website and you give her the “website” tag, she becomes part of the “website” tagged list. If she shows up at one of your webinars, you can give her a tag for that as well.

Pinpointe’s tools mean better targeting.

With Pinpointe, you never have to worry about losing a contact because you don’t remember what list they’re in. And you never have to worry about the same contact ending up in more than one place. Just remember to put everyone into a single database and tag them as you import. Add as much information as you have about your contacts, and use segments to pull the ones you want to mail based on their built-in and custom fields. If you remember these concepts, you’ll see your response rates go up immediately.

RELATED: What’s the Difference Between Databases, Segments, and Tagged Lists? [Includes Infographic]