But if you want to be super efficient, you’ll combine your Saved Searches with Alerts.

First, a few words about Alerts. You set up alerts so you don’t have to constantly check countless mailboxes. Determine what you want to be informed about  — all mail, unread mail, mail assigned to you, which mailbox you’re interested in, and how often you want to be notified. Then set up as many alerts as you’d like. When mail comes in meeting your criteria, Email Center Pro sends an email to the contact email address you’ve listed for your account, on the time schedule you’ve chosen.

In other words, you’ve got your biff@yourcompany.com email address that you’re in and out of all day long. And then you’ve got your sales@, help@, info@ addresses coming into ECP. You don’t want to spend any unnecessary time hopping from inbox to inbox, but you do want to know what’s going on in all those mailboxes.

So you set up some alerts to go to your biff@ address. Maybe you want to be notified hourly when there’s unread mail in your sales@ box, and three times a day when there’s mail assigned to you in info@. Set up takes a few seconds.

Just click the Accounts & Tools link at the top of your screen, and click on the Alerts tab. You’ll see all sorts of options there, such as how often to be notified, what kind of mail you want to know about, and so on.

At this point, think back to last week’s post about Saved Searches. We discussed a hypothetical search for mail sent by Bob, assigned to Janet, tagged Newsletter, and unread. Now let’s say we saved that search and called it Sent by Bob. One way to use it would be to periodically go into ECP and run the search. Or…

We can set up an alert to let us know when mail fulfilling all our Saved Search arrives. In the Sent by Bob search, it’s possible that there are only three or four messages a month that meet all the criteria. Yet you need to know about them as soon as possible. In this case, simply click the “Mailbox” field in your Alerts and scroll down until you see the Saved Searches at the bottom of the list – and click the Sent by Bob saved search.

Your Saved Search + Alert allows you to concentrate on all your other tasks, secure in the knowledge that as soon as that Sent by Bob message hits ECP, you’ll be alerted and be able to deal with it — without having to stalk your inboxes waiting for it to happen.

To access the new plans, open your Sample Plan Browser, and click Refresh List.

In addition to the sample plans that you previously had access to, you’ll now find marketing plans for:

• Business Employee Trainer
• Toilet Rebate Promotion
• Jewelry Artisan
• Real Estate
• Hotel and Motel
• Restaurant
• Software Company
• Catering and Ballroom Rental
• Accounting and Bookkeeping
• Personal Insurance Agent

Remember, you can view any sample plan as a PDF, or open it up in the software to edit and make it your own.

Click here to learn more about Marketing Plan Pro Powered by Duct Tape Marketing.

Well, not really. But when you have email you want to keep track of but you don’t want to check 15 mailboxes throughout the day, you’ll feel like Saved Searches are a dream come true.

You have a lot of options in using Email Center Pro Saves Searches. You can search for mail by date, sender, subject, tag, and about 15 other criteria. And you can combine criteria, so you can look for mail sent by Bob between January 1 and January 15. Or mail sent by Bob and tagged Follow Up. Or mail sent by Bob, assigned to Janet, tagged Newsletter, and unread. You get the idea…

Now, there are two ways to use this. There’s the one time search, where you just really need to find that one email. You can put together a saved search, but not save it. Find what you’re looking for, and then just move on.

Or you can create the searches that you’re going to use time after time. For instance, I have saved searches created to show me all the mail my supervisor sent related to certain products (by tag and by subject line) . By defining the search criteria and saving the search,  I can easily look at all the mail I want to see.

Once created and saved, you have the option of sharing your search. So if it’s a personal one that nobody else really needs access to, fine. It’s only available to you. But if you want your team members to use the search to track the particulars as you’ve described them, then you just click the Share box, and your search will show up in everyone’s list.

Now, here’s the coolest part: You can create an alert to tell you when there’s mail that meets the criteria of your Saved Search! Check out my next post for details on setting up the alerts you need to make your life even easier.

This is not good.

Since Email Center Pro is sending mail on behalf of your domain, some servers are going to think this is suspicious behavior, which is why your message may end up with the Viagra ads and real estate offers.

But if you set up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record, essentially telling your domain that ECP is allowed to send for you, you’ll find that your emails will get through much more reliably.

ECP help provides detailed instructions for setting up the SPF record. All you need is access to your domain’s control panel, and you should be in business.

Since I haven’t actually been taking advantage of the connection between this blog and the ECP dashboard until now, I thought it might be a good time to link back to some recent posts you might have missed.

First, let’s talk about managing contacts. Most email programs have some version of contact management, but they don’t usually cross over to functions outside of email. Check out 3,2,1 Contact… How Do You Keep Track to find out how much more Email Center Pro has to offer.

Learning how to control your email is a common thread on this blog. The recent Who’s the Boss post addressed some outdated ways to gain the upper hand, and suggests alternatives to the same-old same-old approach.

Finally, we see the frequent articles and blog posts about the demise of email at the hands  social media and we just don’t agree. Don’t Believe the Hype offers a counter argument to the currently popular “email is dead” chorus.

To see an example for the current topic, click the Examples tab in the Instructions and Examples window:

Click Next Example to see more.

Click Paste Into Topic to paste the current example into your topic as a starting point for your own text.

The Premier Edition of Business Plan Pro has a neat little feature called the Cash Pilot for testing out these scenarios with all of your plan financials taken into account:

• On the plan toolbar, click Cash Pilot.
• The bottom section is your Control Panel: click in the boxes and type (or adjust numbers up and down with the arrow keys) to change your assumptions for:
  • Months of Inventory On-hand
  • Minimum Inventory Purchase
  • Collection Period
  • Sales on Credit %
  • Payment Delay

The left side shows your Planned Cash (your plan’s current numbers). The right side shows Adjusted Cash (what happens to your Cash Balance and Net Cash Flow with the new assumptions):

Go ahead, test out your ideas, and see what happens to your plan. If you like what you see, just close the Cash Pilot to apply the new numbers to your plan. If your tests show these changes would put you in the red, click Reset All (in the lower right corner) to go back to your original projections.

Meet Alex and Evan, two of the dedicated ECP programmers who used to get woken up at 2:00 in the morning with alerts that the servers were struggling to handle all of your mail. These days, they’re a lot more rested.

The most recent improvements to Email Center Pro are largely behind-the-scenes upgrades that help you serve your customers faster and more reliably.

More helpful Search results

One change you can actually see is in the Search function. We noticed that a lot of our users were using search for “names@domain”, rather than opening the Contacts tab to look specifically for people.

You’ll see that the Search box on the top right of your Email Center Pro screen now contains an arrow. Click the arrow next time you’re using the search, and use the drop-down menu to focus your search results on emails, contacts, templates, or tagged conversations.

Then you might want to consider forecasting your sales (or part of your sales) with a subscription, or churn-rate, model. This kind of sales forecast allows you to make projections that take into account ongoing revenue, new customers, and cancellations.

Both Business Plan Pro and Marketing Plan Pro have a special add-in sales forecast for handling subscription sales. To access this feature:

First, download it from our website

1. Make sure you have a working Internet connection open
2. Open your business or marketing plan in your Palo Alto software program
3. On the Tools menu, click Add-ins
4. (Note: your serial number should automatically load in the web page. If it doesn’t, you can find it by clicking About in the Help menu)
5. Scroll down the list until you find Sales Forecast-Subscription (Churn Rate) Model
6. Click Download Component
7. If prompted to Find a program or Save the file, click Save. Then browse to a location where you want to save it, such as your Desktop.

Then, import it into your plan

1. Return to your plan software
2. On the File menu, click Import
3. Choose Import an Add-In, and click Next
4. Browse to the location where you saved the downloaded file
5. Highlight the downloaded file name and click Open, then click Next
6. Click Finish

The new subscription model sales forecast will open for you to see and work with. Instructions above the spreadsheet get you started. You can also click Search on the Help menu, and search for “subscription” to find more information.

Finally, link it to your tables
The Subscription forecast currently exists in your plan as a stand-alone table. It doesn’t replace your regular Sales Forecast table, and doesn’t feed into your plan’s financial data. To make your subscription forecast part of your financial plan, you can build a link in the main Sales Forecast table to the “Total Sales” row of the Subscription Model sales forecast.

Click here for detailed instructions on linking your Subscription Model to your main Sales Forecast.

While the wizards are designed for users who aren’t used to doing their own financial projections, the spreadsheets still offer a great deal of help in understanding what kind of data belongs where.

Row Help
In addition to the general Instructions above each table, spreadsheets contain definitions for every row, which depend on your Table Settings. To see Row-by-row help in your Spreadsheet, simply click on a cell in the row you wish to learn more about, and read the definition which displays along the bottom of your program window.

Can’t See Row-by-Row Help?
If you do not see the Row definition window below your spreadsheet, make sure there is a checkmark next to Row by Row Help on the View menu.

Example
The top line of your Row-by Row help lists the row number and label, to make sure you are reading the right definition. In the example below, all three row names have been filled in; note how the new row labels appear as part of the row definitions (”University Students“).