With the holiday season upon us, it is time to put your plans for holiday outreach into action. Ongoing client communication is vital throughout the year, but there is perhaps no other season when opportunities for natural points of contact are so readily available to you. This presents you with multiple occasions for building good will and strengthening your client relationships.

Redtail provides a significant amount of documentation and video help to assist with marketing and outreach. We’re including links to all of that here, along with a brief description where necessary of what you’ll find at each link.

Additionally, following these links we offer a FAQ for Holiday Resources.

We hope this resource on Holiday Resources in Redtail will prove useful to you in your efforts to spread good will and stay in touch with your clients during the holidays.

Redtail CRM tools:

Any combination of the tools within Redtail below may play a part in your holiday outreach preparation and process.

Client Segmentation

You may want to send physical mailings to a certain group of contacts while sending email to another. Or, perhaps you want to create a social holiday campaign. Redtail makes it easy to segment your contacts so that you can pinpoint which of your contacts are targeted with a specific holiday outreach effort. If you haven’t already done so, you can go ahead and begin creating Quicklists or Tag Groups of the various contact groups that you intend to reach out to this holiday season. Once you have your groups segmented, you’ll be ready to go in terms of lists for putting together your mailings, etc.

Mail Merge

You can create your own holiday message templates within Microsoft Word and upload those to merge with your contact records. Instructions for doing so are here (or for Mac users here).

After uploading your template(s), you can then merge them with contacts individually or in bulk. If you need to address a letter to both spouses or partners, instructions for doing so are here.

You can also merge labels or envelopes from within your CRM, including custom labels that you create yourself.

Custom Exports

If you want to include fields in your merge template that are not on Redtail’s list of available mail merge fields, you would need to create a Custom Export that includes those desired fields, export your desired contacts, and run the merge within Microsoft Word itself. Instructions for accomplishing this can be found here.

Broadcast Email

You can create and send holiday greetings via email to your selected contacts from within Redtail CRM, using our Broadcast Email functionality. Instructions are here.

Workflows and Calendar

Don’t overlook the importance of mapping out your holiday planning and outreach. Workflows and/or Calendar Activities can assist with keeping those responsible for meeting your holiday outreach on track to meet the necessary deadlines.

Reports

Two standard reports in Redtail that could prove useful for the purposes of creating your groups for outreach and/or gift giving where applicable are the Contact User Defined Fields Report and the Contacts by Keyword Report, if your office uses UDFs and Keywords to track more detailed information about clients.

Integration partner tools:

Below is a list of Redtail integration partners that might prove valuable in your holiday outreach efforts.

Advisor Stream

If you have an account with AdvisorStream, you can sync Redtail contact data to their platform for the purposes of digital marketing.

Clout

Import your Redtail contacts into Clout to take advantage of their growth marketing campaigns.

Constant Contact

If you have a Constant Contact account, Redtail allows you to send contact data tailored for their  automated email campaigns.

e-Relationship

With this integration you can sync your Redtail contacts to e-Relationship and reach out to them using their marketing tools.

FMeX (Financial Media Exchange)

If you are an FMeX subscriber, you can sync your Redtail contact data over to their platform and then reach out to your clients and prospects via custom branded emails, e-newsletters and social posts using FMeX’s extensive, licensed library of articles from established financial publishers.

FMG Suite

If you have an FMG Suite account, Redtail allows you to sync contact data to their platform and take advantage of their automated campaigns, including email, social media, video, birthday and holiday campaigns.

Leadjig

With a Leadjig account you can sync your Redtail contacts to their platform to take advantage of their financial advisor marketing tools.

Lead Pilot

Send your Redtail contacts to Lead Pilot to take advantage of their customizable marketing campaigns for advisors.

Levitate

With Levitate you can sync your Redtail contacts over and use their keep-in-touch marketing tool for advisors.

MailChimp

If you have a MailChimp account, Redtail allows you to send contact data tailored for their automated email campaigns.

MarketingPro

If you are a MarketingPro subscriber, you can easily push any of their holiday templates over to your CRM in order to merge them in bulk with your selected contacts.

SendOutCards

If you have an account with SendOutCards, Redtail makes it easy to prepare an export of contacts tailored to their system which you can then import into your SendOutCards account.

Snappy Kraken

Import your Redtail contacts into Snappy Kraken to implement their complete digital marketing strategy with your clients.

Stamps.com

Finally, if you have an account with Stamps.com, you can also handle all of your official US postage needs for all those mailings you’ll be sending from the desk in your office. From your Advanced Search page, you can select the Stamps.com Export from the Exports menu to prepare the contact files with which you’ll be working.

Sample Templates

While only one or two of the templates below are holiday-specific, you might find some of them valuable as a starting point for holiday mailings that you can edit as you wish.

• Sample Mail Merge Card Templates
• Sample Mail Merge Envelope Templates
• Sample Mail Merge Letter Templates

Video / Recorded Webinar Links

• Broadcast Email [14:39] – Broadcast Emails provide you with a method of sending out an email to any number of your contacts, personalized to each recipient through the use of acceptable Email Merge Fields. This tutorial goes over some of the important points of setting up and utilizing Broadcast Emails.
• Redtail Essentials: Broadcast Email [24:50] – Here’s a Broadcast Email webinar where we dove into the features that make Broadcast Email such a useful tool.
• Redtail Essentials: Mail Merge [43:57] – The holidays are a great time to send physical mailings to clients and Redtail helps streamline the mailing process through its mail merge feature. This webinar covers creating/uploading your mail merge templates, selecting your recipients, and running the merge. Additionally, we take a look at creating labels and keywords to assist in the process.
• Segmenting your Client Data [36:40] – Lists provide a great way to segment your contacts for marketing purposes as well as for holiday outreach. There are two ways in Redtail to create lists and each option offers its own distinct advantages.
• How To Use Redtail CRM for Marketing [35:26] – This webinar covers some of the tools available within Redtail that can assist you with your marketing/holiday efforts, ranging from client segmentation methods to blast emails to your selected groups.

• Best Practice Partner Webinar – AdvisorStream [34:04]
• Best Practice Partner Spotlight – FMeX [29:43]
• Best Practice Partner Spotlight: FMG Suite [43:37]
• Best Practice Partner Webinar – Lead Pilot [21:21]
• New Partner Spotlight: Levitate [32:08]
• New Partner Spotlight: Snappy Kraken [23:01]

FAQ

Below are some of the most common questions we receive about holiday marketing, as reported by members of our Support Team.

How do I make one mail merge template and use it on one Quicklist or Tag Group for married as well as single people?

This is one of the most common questions we receive about mail merges, and the process for setting up a mail merge template to accomplish this is pretty straightforward. See a write-up explaining the process here.

I haven’t assigned Family Names to single individuals in my database. Now, when I run mail merges where the Family Name merge field is included and single individuals are a part of my list, I’m not sure what to do.

You have two options here:

1. From your advanced search page where you have your list for your mail merge pulled up, run this search to locate all individuals in your list without a Family Name entered:
   If you have time, you could then go through and add Family Names for those single individuals. Read more about Family Names and how to use them here.
2. Alternatively, run the search above and use a different mail merge template without a Family Name field included for those single individuals.

I’ve heard I can use Tag Groups, Quicklists, Keywords, and/or User Defined Fields as tools for client segmentation, but I don’t really understand how all of these work. Can you explain the difference?

What distinguishes Tag Groups from QuickLists is that the process of adding contacts to or removing contacts from a Tag Group is manual.  Contacts in your Tag Groups, in other words, are handpicked by you to be in that particular group and are static unless you add or remove contacts. Quicklists, on the other hand, are saved searches, and hence dynamic, since the search parameters you’ve used to establish a Quicklist can produce different search results as contact data is updated.

You can read what distinguishes Keywords and User Defined Fields here. While their uses are a little different, it’s important to remember that contacts can be sent to Advanced Search based upon their Keyword or UDF values, which means you can then take further group actions, such as a mail merge, based upon groups that share a Keyword or a UDF.

Our Support Team is always happy to help you troubleshoot this or any other questions you may have about marketing or holiday resources within Redtail.