CARAT Contacts is a contact management software (one of the modules in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)) that allows you to, from the comfort of your office or home, manage your contacts list, send out useful information to your contacts to inform them about your new product, new service or just to keep them updated for little or no cost!

First, you input contact data obtained from the name cards you collect, accounts receivable software, accounts payable software, e-mail software and other sources. After you have entered the data, you can filter out contacts based on numerous criteria and merge them to form letters, send e-mail or SMS or print mailing labels.

In this way, you can send information about your products or services, newsletters, product launches, announcements, change of company or personnel information and any other information you can think of to a select group of people on your list. You save money because you are only sending information out to specified contacts whom you know would be interested to know what you want to tell them.

Some Benefits Of Using CARAT Contacts

• You can combine all your contacts into one place to avoid duplication
• You can select contacts based on certain criteria or combination to better target specified contacts
• You can perform a spam check on your contacts to fish out duplicate e-mail addresses, duplicate domain names, duplicate handphone numbers and specified local parts of the e-mail address ^new
• You can search and export data for use by other programs to avoid retyping
• You can send SMS to one or many contacts depending on your selection (requires SMS gateway)
• You can send e-mail anytime at little or no cost from the comfort of your home or office
• You can group and select contacts based on their business activities
• You can group and select contacts based on the festivals they celebrate
• You can format and print mailing labels from within the program
• You can allow only authorised users to access your contact data to protect them
• You can easily make backups of your data for better protection against loss of data due to hardware failure

Why Use It?

Imagine if you are not using CARAT Contacts; your name cards are put into plastic bags, boxes, bundled with rubber bands or simply placed anywhere convenient. All these take up space but you know that you will someday need to find information from them. That is the main reason why you don't throw them into the dustbin.

When you input your contact data into CARAT Contacts, your data is neatly organised into individual fields which you can use to search, extract or export to files for use by other programs. Suddenly, the thousands of name cards you have collected are useful to you and are potential business opportunities.

When To Use It?

You can use CARAT Contacts in many situations where communication of messages to your contacts is required. The following represents the most common use for CARAT Contacts:-

Fund Raising: If you are a charitable body or organisation that depends on the public for money, you would probably spend a lot of time soliciting donations to fund your organisation. Preparing appeal letters, printing mailing labels, attaching stamps and posting the letters are time-consuming and costly activities. Postage costs have also increased by two fold. Most people nowadays have an e-mail address and you could reach more people faster and at a much lower cost by e-mailing your appeal messages.

Promotions/Sales: If you have a new product you wish to market or gather feedback, sending out offers via e-mail or SMS means reaching out to specified people you want to sell or promote your products to. Your contact list is your gold mine for these sort of activity!

Announcements: Do you have a time sensitive message for people in your contact list? Sending e-mail or SMS via CARAT Contacts is a productive and cost-effective exercise.

Who Is It For?

CARAT Contacts can be used by anyone who collects a lot of name cards in the course of meeting people and want to make use of the data on the name cards in a meaningful way. Business owners, business development managers, salesmen, marketing managers, sales managers, public relations managers, customer service managers and people with similar occupations would find CARAT Contacts useful.

A trial version for CARAT Contacts can be obtained from the downloads page.