Get Your Business Growing With ContactMe

When you’re running a business by yourself or in a small team, you’re often prone to the obtrusive clutter in your email inbox – causing you to spend more time sorting everything out and leaving you with less time to do your job. Inside all of this clutter, you’re expected to easily identify clients and separate these important messages from the rest but this can also lead to a lot of headaches.

ContactMe does all of this and more – it offers a great and useful way to manage all of your contacts and make discussion with your clients that extra bit easier. Offering support for almost every aspect of contact management, it can be a really great addition to any business. Read on to see what I’m talking about.

Overview

ContactMe is a nifty web app that can make communications between your business and your client so much simpler. As well as being a really intuitive hub to comprise your entire contact database, it offers the ability to add a contact form to your website that allows your clients to easily contact you, with discussions being tracked and easily shown in the contact’s view by ContactMe.

With support for task management, an integrated calendar and the easy generation and displaying of reports on data associated with an account, it really is one of the rare gems that is just entirely functional.

Interface

One of the main things about ContactMe that stood out for me is its stupidly clean interface. The app really is easy on the eyes. Everything is shown clearly and works perfectly, meaning less time is spent trying to navigate and more is spent actually using the app for its purpose.

From the way contacts are managed to the animated search results, everything is displayed just right and offers the right balance of functionality and overall visual appeal. It sounds cliché but it’s one of the apps that’s so simple to use, even a grandparent could use it.

Pricing

In terms of the actual costs, ContactMe isn’t an app that will take a hit on your wallet because its functionality alone is more than worth the price. The app employs the “freemium” pricing model, meaning that a basic free account can be registered as standard and can optionally be upgraded to gain more features.

Task management, calendars and reminders can be taken advantage of in the paid packages and, to make sure that you know what you’re getting, they even offer a free 14-day trial of a pro plan. Though the step up from free to the “Form Plus” plan doesn’t really add many features for the price, the “Biz Pro” package is definitely worth getting if you’re fully dedicated to providing a great means of support to your visitors.

Importing Contacts

ContactMe offers an easy way to import your already-existing contacts from your email accounts quickly and they support all the major email providers. Once the account has been connected to a particular provider, a list of all email contacts will be displayed. Then you can choose all required contacts, which would then be automatically added to the ContactMe contacts list.

It’s then possible to create profiles with these, adding notes and using them generally with the app. As well as simply importing the contacts, you can add them manually should it be required.

There’s also the ability to import contacts from CSV files, making it really easy to use already-existing data from a database or spreadsheet.

Adding Buttons

One of the primary and most useful features of ContactMe, is its easy process to add buttons to your sites. The system works by showing a button in a designated part of a website and then when a user clicks on this, they are shown a form that they can use to send a message to your organisation. Once they’ve submitted the form, the data they have entered is automatically added to the system and becomes readily available as a profile for the client should you need to refer to it in the future.

To add the button, it’s as simple as copying and pasting a bit of JavaScript code into your website’s source. It also supports various publishing platforms which makes it even easier to add the button and you can also even customize the color of it to match the design.

Conversations

This is where all of the magic happens. Once there are contacts in the system, it’s possible to even keep a track of your emails through ContactMe. All emails that the contact sends through ContactMe automatically appear in the discussions section, under the profile, and makes it simple to reference all of the conversations between you and your contact. As long as you BCC the ContactMe email address in your emails back to the client, they’re also added. However, the only problem I’ve found is that when the contact does email back directly to the message, they’re not aware that the BCC exists – meaning that these emails are discarded and simply sent as emails, not showing up in ContactMe.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I was really impressed by ContactMe and, though it wasn’t really simple at first to understand the concept of the app, I picked it up quite easily and was quickly able to take full advantage of the app. It looks great and works great, and I can’t think of many improvements it needs except for the obvious threaded discussions problem I found. It really is a great way to manage your contacts, especially when you’re on a budget (seriously, it’s less than the cost of a postage stamp per day). I would definitely recommend this to any small business that needs a new and innovative way of tracking their regular or new contacts.