Manage business contacts and target marketing with Contacts web database template (video)

On our relaunched Access product page on Office.com, we focus on how Access can help you run your small business. To address an important business need, we've added articles and videos to help you get started using the Contacts web database template to organize and manage your business contacts. 

In this post, I’ll revisit this longtime favorite template, and we’ll see how you can also use it for targeting your marketing, such as directing your customer marketing campaigns. Here's a short video on how it works.

If your contacts data is spread across different applications, the first step in getting all the data in one place is to download the Contacts web database template. In addition to making it easier to manage all your business contacts from one location, this database provides the option to store additional information about each contact by attaching pictures and relevant document files.

Next, you can either import or add existing contact information to the database. Now you'll be able to track information such as comments on your interactions with a contact. Access even adds a date and time to it. Use the filter or search features to locate a specific contact or contacts in a particular region. You’ll also get a great start with creating reports such as a Contacts Address Book, with the five ready-made report formats in the template. As with all other Access templates, you can further customize your Contacts database as your business needs change. You can also publish the database to a Microsoft SharePoint server that is running Access Services.

To learn more about the template, see the article Use the Contacts Web Database template to target your customer marketing more efficiently.

Stay tuned for information about our other business templates, and let us know what you think! What other templates or articles would you like to see? How can we better help you to get the most out of Access?

--Radhika Shankar