Customer Profiles: I Send Your Email
Sandi Karchmer Solow of I Send Your Email
Organization Profile: As head of I Send Your Email, Sandi Karchmer Solow is an email marketing manager for companies of all sizes. The company executes well-planned email marketing campaigns and aims to help expand sales and awareness for companies reaching 100 customers or 1 million. She is a resource for organizations that are either beginning an email marketing program or have an established program that needs additional resources. Her services include messaging development, audience identification, format and design and measurement and analysis.
Summary: Companies can use email as an effective marketing tool, but they might not have the technology or the time to do it effectively themselves. I Send Your Email, lead by independent consultant Sandi Karchmer Solow, offers organizations a fresh perspective, helping them think about what it is they want to say and who wants to hear it. Managing her contacts in Batchbook, by BatchBlue Software, Karchmer Solow is able to organize and stay on top of a vast database of prospects, colleagues, clients and friends to keep her business running smoothly.
Website: isendyouremail.com
Batchbook Social CRM Enables Consultant to Deliver on ‘I Send Your Email’ Mission
Sandi Karchmer Solow prefers to use technology solutions that are as straightforward as her business.
Karchmer Solow is the powerhouse behind I Send Your Email, an email marketing manager for companies of all sizes. As an outside resource to enhance current marketing programs, Karchmer Solow is frequently fielding incoming informational queries. To save time and to keep her one-person-show of an office supremely organized, Karchmer Solow turns to BatcbBook by BatchBlue Software, a customizable, Web-based social contact relationship manager (CRM).
“I don’t have all day to fiddle with how to use the software. It’s a no-brains-required solution, and I mean that as a compliment,” said Karchmer Solow, an independent consultant. “It’s a very flexible tool, and I am able to easily decide which buckets my contacts belong in. I like that I can quickly develop my own groupings and am not tied to a software developer’s idea of how I should categorize my contacts.”
Karchmer Solow was introduced to Batchbook in fall 2008 through MailChimp, a company based in Atlanta, Ga., like her own, which uses heavy-duty tools to make light work of sending email newsletters to customers, managing subscriber lists and tracking campaign performance. She uses MailChimp in two ways, in part to provide services to her clients and to market her own business. She was attracted to the idea that she could sync up her Batchbook contacts with her MailChimp account since the two companies are partners in The Small Business Web.
“In 2007, I had made a hasty decision to sign up with a huge enterprise CRM, but I didn’t find it very useful and didn’t get my money’s worth,” said Karchmer Solow. “I like Batchbook’s user interface, and its style appeals to me. Perhaps it is the design that looks grown-up but doesn’t take itself too seriously. Regardless, it has provided a great way for me to think about future business based on the way I’ve tagged contacts in my account.”
Batchbook enables Karchmer Solow to keep track of her business, personal and social networking contacts with a flexible, easy-to-use contact database. Also, the software’s customizable dashboard allows her to search across the Internet to identify where her company or contacts are being mentioned. For example, she can, in a single place, record contact information and the latest interactions with clients, leads, professional contacts she has met at conferences, previous colleagues, those to whom she has sent RFPs in the past and anyone who has contacted her via her Web site.
“Batchbook has been a great repository of names that I have come across in various ways. I need a way to record all that data so that it is manageable and ordered,” said Karchmer Solow.
Batchbook’s Tags and SuperTags features allow Karchmer Solow to create custom fields for each contact to capture the information that is important to her, whether using text, date, multiple choice, number or other types of fields. She was not able to tailor contact information she was collecting as specifically to her needs within other CRM products.
A home office worker, Karchmer Solow also appreciates Batchbook’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and the privacy of her online database.
“Like many entrepreneurs, I don’t have a lot of overhead. If my computer crashes, I don’t have an IT department to call to fix it. But, with Batchbook, I know I can just hop on another computer anywhere and keep working,” said Karchmer Solow.
While Karchmer Solow often uses the data in Batchbook to market her own business, she also logs emails, phone call notes or any other relevant communications with her contacts, enabling her to follow the communications stream for every individual. Also, with BatchBox email forwarding, she can send emails directly to Batchbook to connect to relevant contacts. To-do action items are also added to the tickler file through Batchbook, with easy to set reminders, she said.
Through The Small Business Web, and referrals from other business contacts, Karchmer Solow has also discovered FreshBooks for tracking billing and invoicing clients and has begun using Outright’s online booking solution for some expenses that are not reimbursable. The applications work together through their open application programming interfaces (APIs) and save her even more time in her records-keeping processes.
“Batchbook has been a great tool for personal and professional organization for me,” said Karchmer Solow.
