Last week I wrote about setting up Saved Searches in Email Center Pro, and how they’ll save you valuable time.

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.

Tags: ECP, ECP Power Users, ecp update
Posted on January 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

Saved Searches saved my life.

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.

Tags: ECP, ECP Power Users, ecp update, news
Posted on January 7th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Don’t you hate it when you send a customer or client an email, only to hear back from them that they didn’t receive it? You have to ask them if they checked their spam folder, and are embarrassed to hear that indeed, your message has been tagged with that scarlet (pinkish?) letter.

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.

Tags: ECP, ECP Power Users, ecp update, technical
Posted on December 8th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Email Center Pro does a great job of helping your team get to “Inbox Zero,” especially since conversations are auto-archived after you’ve dealt with them (by default, but this setting can be changed).  Most of our users are big fans of this strategy, as conversations only hang around in the inbox when they need attention, and otherwise they’re tucked away safely in the archive.  When a customer responds, the whole thread comes right back into the inbox, ready for your next move.  The reality for many organizations is that the conversation isn’t always so back and forth – for example you’ve sent a quote but haven’t heard back… you want to give people a bit of time to make their decision, but you also want to make sure not to lose track of these leads.

Thankfully, with Email Center Pro’s saved searches feature, you’ll never lose track of another promising lead again.  I put together an example search (pictured) that will help your team keep tabs on these contacts.  When responding to a message to which you want to ensure some follow-up, add a simple tag such as “follow up.”  Then you can set up a saved search with the following 2 rules:

• Tag is “follow up” (or any other tag/tags you wish to use for this purpose).
• Action Date is older than 1 week (or your preferred follow-up window) – you could also specify Message Date as the criterion. The distinction is that internal activity such as adding a note, etc. will update the Action Date, whereas the Message Date is determined by the most recent message.

That’s it! Email Center Pro will track these threads for you and present you with a list of applicable conversations when the time comes to contact the lead again.  You can even set up alerts or an RSS feed based on this saved search and have the results delivered directly to your email or feed reader when there’s a conversation that needs some follow up.

Tags: ECP, ecp update
Posted on December 5th, 2008 | No Comments »