Signing up with BatchBook is a snap. You can even sign up for a service called BabyBlue that is 100% free but it is single user only and is limited to 200 contact/company records and has been stripped of certain other features. I had done this initially in order to check it out. This week I did upgrade to their NavyBlue package at $9.95 per month which does have 100% of the features offered and an unlimited number of contacts and comes with a 30 day free trial. Why BatchBook?
Right now it is the closest choice I can find that will allow me to combine social networks, my email, and a CRM. It syncs with Google Apps contacts and integrates with Rapportive (social networks) and MailChimp (email marketing). I have been using Rapportive for the past few months and have been investigating MailChimp so this is a natural match. MailChimp will also integrate with WordPress.org and you are looking at that right now. Other integrations are also available.
The first step for me in getting this started was to move my existing contacts over to BatchBook. You have two choices initially … you can do an export of your contacts and then import those or you can do a Google Contacts Sync. I chose the latter. As I have multiple email databases, I first imported all of those into Gmail in order to have one master database. Syncing between BatchBook and Gmail is one-way only other than this initial sync. What this means is that records that have been edited or added directly to BatchBook can be synced to your Gmail contacts. However, editing a contact in Gmail will not update that contact in BatchBook. It literally took me about 5 times to get this right and every mistake meant having to delete all contacts in BatchBook and start over from scratch so please read this closely. For what it is worth, this is a very simple process and I just made some very simple errors ….
- You can selectively choose what contacts you want to move over to BatchBook and have them sync from thereon. Create a group for this in Gmail and add those contacts to this group.
- Carefully review each contact’s records for accuracy and any other information you do not want to transfer over. For example, some of the notes fields on my contacts contained information that was basically leftover’s from previous imports that Gmail did not know how to categorize. I deleted this info from each record. Of course, you will be able to edit any of this after the import if you prefer to take that route.
- If you have multiple phone numbers and email addresses on a record, be sure that each is labeled differently. I am a lazy record keeper and might have three email addresses all labeled as “Home”. BatchBook will look at this label and pick one only where there are multiples with the same label. A lesson learned hard.
- When you get into the sync process, BatchBook will ask you to choose which Google account you wish to sync from. This cost me about 4 hours or more of work as I was given 3 choices and two of those were identically labeled by my domain name and naturally I chose the default. Bad choice (smile).
It turns out that I have both a Google Contacts account and a Google Gmail Contacts account and both are assigned to my domain name. While both have a lot of the same records, they are not all the same and the details on each record are not all identical. What!? This still makes no sense to me but the easy way to tell which one you want is to look for that group that you created as it will only appear on the account that you want to use. I can’t even begin to tell you what grief this caused me in learning this process. From there, you will be asked to assign a tag to this group of imports. The default tag is “gmail” and that worked fine for me. Every record that comes in during this sync process will have this tag attached to it and this tag will determine what records will be synced going forward.
Tags are used in BatchBook to associate (group) contacts. I will be doing a separate post on tags and “Super Tags” later as this is a powerful component of BatchBook. In this case, the “gmail” tag is used to group contacts for sync with Gmail. As you add contacts to BatchBook, if you wish them to sync with Gmail, you will want to add this same tag to their record. Your will also notice in Gmail that a new group has been created by BatchBook that is your “sync group”. Please note that contacts and their companies count as one record for each (2). Adding records directly from Gmail to this group will not create a sync for that record. This must be done in BatchBook.
After your initial sync, you have several methods of adding contacts to BatchBook …
- You can set up as many additional sync groups as you wish and repeat the sync setup for each group.
- Import records as you wish but be sure to attach the “gmail” or sync tag to each once you have them in BatchBook if you want them to sync to gmail. Please note that each sync group may have it’s own sync tag.
- You may “reply to” or “forward” an email while including your BatchBook email address which will usually appear in the BCC field. If you have an existing matching account in BatchBook, this communication will be attached to that record. If not, it will create a record for you. You will still want to go to that record, edit it, and attach the sync tag if so desired.
- By adding BatchBook to Rapportive in your Gmail, you will not only see the contact’s record in addition to their social networks when opening an email, there will be a big blue button if no record exists that will offer you to “BatchBook It” and add this email address as a contact record in BatchBook. Sweeet!!
There are a few issues regarding the sync that I am still trying to work out. I also sync my contacts with my BlackBerry and noticed that records there were not showing up. You may or may not have noticed that your Gmail contacts database has two system groups .. “My Contacts” and “All Contacts”. The “All Contacts” number will be the higher of the two. My BlackBerry syncs with “My Contacts” only. I would guess that the idea behind this is that I really don’t care about every contact, I only care about “My Contacts”. Those new records that you create in BatchBook will be added to Gmail in which category? That’s right. “All Contacts”. Crap! What this means is that, at least for me, if you want them in your BlackBerry you will need to move each of these records from “All Contacts” to “My Contacts”. You can do this one at a time or just call up the “All Contact” group, select “all”, and then move everything over to “My Contacts” and only the ones who were not already tagged as such will be moved. Of course, this means that some stuff you may not want will also move over but those will not be added to BatchBook by this means so we have that going for us (smile). This also created duplicate records that I needed to merge. I’m not sure why and I’m still working to resolve this issue.
Thanks for visiting and watch for more!
Craig
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Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. NetWorks! Boise Valley is a business to business networking organization for the most serious sales and marketing professionals only.
