Make it Easy for a Prospect to Find You in Their Contacts List

Your contact list is composed of more than just prospects and clients. You hold onto contact information in case you need someone’s services or goods at a later date. You may need a local plumber you met or referred to. You may need print services when you are ready to send direct mail for your marketing campaigns. In all these cases you probably won’t even remember that individual’s name, but you certainly know what keywords will find him (like “plumber”).

Type plumber in your Search address books text box (to get plumbers that have the word plumber in their name or job description), or you click on the Contacts Navbar button and type plumber into the Search all Contact Items (to get plumbers that have the word plumber anywhere in the contact including the notes area). You’ll get a list of names if more than one qualifies, and you can call any of them.

But won’t you be calling the one for which you have found has the best rates or exact service required, or even the person that you just liked and were comfortable with? If that plumber had all that information in the notes area (and you would have already known that when they sent you their VCard), they made it easy for you to select them from among others.

So let’s turn that around. Likewise, you should complete YOUR VCard for inclusion with your email so that the plumber will find YOU based on keywords that you supplied best suiting what is you do. Thus, be specific and give as much information as you can on your VCard to cover all the bases.

And here’s another strategy: Don’t just include your information in the notes area—polish your Notes area and let your marketing material shine. Stir it up with colored fonts, pictures, tables, even your jpg signature (sign your name, scan it, crop it, and include it (Insert tab, Picture Icon).

Now there is a caveat here but not an insurmountable one. When you send a VCard using your contact with the information and layout above, Outlook does something peculiar but predictable—it strips all those wonderful fonts out and just sends plain text. It does this to keep VCards compliant with the Internet Mail Consortium which recommends keeping things simple for ease of general use. That way, even if you send your VCard to another user who is NOT using Outlook, they can still get the same information.

However, if you know your recipient is using Outlook, there is a short and powerful way around this.

First, right-click on the Personal Folders and select New folder
Type _VCard in the Name field (don’t forget the underscore), and select Contact Items in the Folder contains box

Right-click drag your contact into this folder (select Copy). Here’s how this will look when you select Folder List view:

Now, when you create a new email, Click on the Insert tab, then Attach Item
Select the _VCard folder and double-click on your single Contact. Your VCard is now in the Attachments and when your recipient double-clicks on it, they will get into their Outlook all your wonderful formatting.