Traveling can be time consuming and especially with trying to keep up with contacts. I have yet to go through the business cards and input them in my contact list. But what about people emailing you, how do you track each person that contact you from a specific event? Well there is the pain staking way of just creating a new email address with maybe the conference name as the contact. Ok, fine, but what if you did not use up all your business cards, it will still have the last conference on that specific card.You can have one universal one if you want, but it is pointless since you can't track it.
It must be the marketing side of me because I tend to track everything, even contacts I meet at specific locations. Well there was a service that was written on Mashable.com on how to avoid spam or even filter out specific email. Well I have been using OtherInbox.com to help track who is contacting me via specific events. Others use it as a temporary inbox when signing up for free things. I actually use it as a separate mailbox to find out who contacted me from specific events.
OtherInbox is an Austin-based start-up founded by serial entrepreneur and email-marketing guru Joshua Baer. OtherInbox is the cure for email overload - it provides consumers with a free email account that automatically organizes newsletters, social networking updates, coupons and receipts from online purchases so that its easy to find the most interesting things and ignore the rest.
So how do I properly use this system to help track my emails from one email address? Well with OtherInbox you can have multiple names without registering it. When you sign up you get an inbox with your username attached to it. So your domain would be @NAMEHERE.otherinbox.com. Your name can be whatever and can be generated whenever you want, so it can be [email protected].
If you want to make another one just change the name to [email protected]. Simple and no need to register the name. Each name you put in front of the @ is a folder which will be created on the otherinbox server, which makes it easy for you to filter what and where the emails are coming from.
What I personally do is have one email with my domain and forward it to an otherinbox folder. For example I will be forwarding the email on my business card to [email protected] - which creates a folder called ADTechNY08 in my inbox. So now I can see who contacted me from my business card and at what conference. I also do not have to register names, I just append it in front of my subdomain extension and I am set. The best part is since I have some business cards left, I will forward my standard email to the new conference.
The next one I am attending is Affiliate Summit West, so the email will look something like this: [email protected]. This tells me that my cards that were pass around at that time would be from someone at Affiliate Summit.
I do not change my forward until I go to a new conference, just because I want to have a live inbox for people that may contact me from that specific conference later on. Which then can be a downside, the reason because lets say you go to conferences every week. Every week you may forward it to a new folder - but the contact you made last week will not contact you maybe 2 weeks later because they need to catch up - this is the only bad part with tracking contacts, unless you make a mailbox for every card you have and conference.
OtherInbox can be used for more than just tracking emails, you can use it to track and just have an inbox for junk stuff. So you want to get that free ebook but do not want to be part of their newsletter, use otherinbox as a temporary email inbox.
There are many other ways to track email from conferences, but I found this to be the easiest and most effective. Other ways require you to check multiple inboxes, creating usernames, etc. This services make it easy and simple.
