The Contact Group Manager

About Contact Group Manager

BEFORE YOU BEGIN  This feature may be hidden in your Autotask instance because it is not activated. If so, you can activate it on the > Admin > Admin Categories > Activations page. Refer to Activations.

Autotask Contact Group Manager is a valuable contact management and notification tool for customer support and marketing. It allows you to organize contacts into flexible groups and then communicate with all members of the group at one time. At the same time, you can create to-dos and notes for all group members to document the communication.

All resources with access to the CRM module can access most Contact Group Manager features. The Email action requires assigned permission.

NOTE  The send email option is designed to allow compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, including an unsubscribe option and features to manage contacts that opt out. Refer to Allowing contacts to unsubscribe.

There are countless ways to use this feature to communicate with your customers and prospects, create to-dos for follow-up, and document your communications with notes.

EXAMPLE  Example 1: Your company wants to inform all customer product champions about a scheduled maintenance outage. You may already have a Product Champions group. If not, you can easily add one.
Once you open or create the Product Champions group, you can create and send an email message to all contacts in the group at once. In addition, you can add a contact note that indicates that the contact was notified of the outage and when. If your email message is not too large, you can even copy the message content and paste it into the note.

EXAMPLE  Example 2: You have just returned from a trade show with a list of new potential customers. You want to send out a follow up email to each new contact and let them know that you will contact them in about five days.
When you import the contact list into Autotask, you can add the contacts to an existing group or create and add them to a new group, all from the Contact Data Import page. You can then open the group in the Contact Group Manager page and select Send Email.
At the same time you can add a follow-up to-do for each contact and a contact note indicating that the email was sent and the follow up assigned. When your actions are ready, click Execute to send the email, create the to-dos, and add the notes.

Getting started

Any resource with access to the CRM module and permission to access Contact Group features can begin creating contact groups immediately. Once the groups are in place and you have added the contacts, you can begin to create to-dos and contact notes for multiple contacts at once. Permission to access Contact Group features is a security level setting. Refer to Creating or editing a custom security level.

However, permission to send emails to contact groups is turned off by default, and must be individually enabled for each resource.

Complete the following steps:

  1. Assign bulk email permissions from the Resource Management Security tab. Refer to Assigning bulk email permission.
  2. Add a contact group. Refer to Adding and managing contact groups.
  3. Add the contacts to the group. Refer to Managing contact group membership. You can also add contacts to the group from the Organization and the Contact pages. Refer to The Contact Groups tab.
  4. Set up and execute your contact actions. Refer to Creating and executing contact actions.
  5. If you want, before leaving the Contact Action page, you can save the current Contact Action page as a Contact Action Template. For information on using Contact Action templates, refer to Managing contact action templates.