Use Contact Types to categorise contacts in any way that suits your business needs. Each contact must be allocated a type, so it is important to establish the list of types early before you have too many recorded in the Contacts database.
Contact Types are particularly relevant when looking up contacts or when performing any form of digital mail merge. This is because contact types are one of the main selection criteria for both searching and reporting contact related functions.
Example
Some typical examples of contact type are: Prospect, Decision Maker, Account Rep, Ordering, Purchasing, Existing Customer Contact etc.
Getting the Contact Type correct becomes important when you plan on doing any sales & marketing promotion and want to target your recorded contacts. Do you want the contacts who already buy from you, or perhaps all contacts who are “Prospects” who you want to have buying from you.
Minimum Requirements
You don’t have to use Contacts at all, but if you do want to create a contacts database, you do need at least one ‘Contact Type’ as it is a required field on contacts.
Changing Established Data
You can start with one contact type initially and add more later if you find you need to group contacts by Type.
Panel Options
- Standard panel features
- Maintenance
- Views
- Audit – shows the audit of data changes made over time to the contact type currently being viewed
- Where used – shows the list of contacts with the type currently being viewed
- Contacts by Type – shows a list of all contacts sorted by type
- Reports
- List Contact Types