By Denise Amrich
If you've paid a recent visit to the all-new ZATZ home page (at http://www.ZATZ.com), you may have noticed that we're getting ready to launch a new publication called WebSpherePower, all about WebSphere, a specialized enterprise tool from IBM. While many of you may never need to use WebSphere, the lead generation process we go through when preparing a new publication is something many of you may be familiar with.
Very often a new publication in a new market means we're starting with an empty contact database. One of the best ways to add contacts is to look for all the related companies online (often using a business partner directory or Google), finding the contact information pages on the Web sites, and cutting and pasting each individual contact into Outlook or ACT! Usually, this requires many back-and-forth visits to the Web page, first to get the name, then the street, then the city, then the state, then the ZIP, then the country, then the phone, then the fax, then the email address, Web site, and so forth.
At first glance, this seems like a pretty easy job and I usually assign it to an assistant. Sadly, the process is tedious, and can often take someone weeks to pull together a complete prospect list for us to call.
AddressGrabber from eGrabber
Recently, though, News Editor Heather McDaniel wrote up a small piece for OutlookPower News about a product called AddressGrabber from a company called eGrabber. AddressGrabber (at http://www.egrabber.com) does one simple thing: it copies an address block from a Web page or other document and pastes the results into the individual fields of your contact database.
I realized this could be just the tool we needed. After all, we've been cutting and pasting for years. And, really, that was the problem. We'd been cutting and pasting for years. A tool that would help us cut our time to market was more than exciting, it would be incredibly useful.
Remember how I said it took weeks of an assistant cutting and pasting contacts to build up a contact database? We installed AddressGrabber and sent the same assistant back out onto the Web. As a test, we had him pull in the same number of addresses as he did before, but this time using AddressGrabber. Amazingly, instead of the process taking more than two weeks, it took less than a day! A process that cost more than $1,000 in labor hours was reduced to costing us under fifty bucks! Add to that AddressGrabber's $80 price, and we still saved $870 on the second half of the project.
AddressGrabber helped us cut and paste, and it helped us cut our costs and cut our time to market.
ContactZone from Melissa Data
Continuing on with our address management theme is another interesting product called ContactZone, from Melissa Data. ContactZone (at http://www.melissadata.com/czr) is another product that can really save you time and money. This product takes physical-world address data in your Outlook contacts database and cleans it up, making sure the ZIP codes are right, giving you appropriate area codes, and verifying the accuracy of your contact information.
