Be Personal - Address you reader in first person. In many situations "human touch" is a great benefit as well.

Don't Write A Book - Direct Mail, whether in online or off, needs to be just that, "Direct". Don't waste time with "warm-up" text.

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere - Vanity will serve its purpose, as long as you don't overdo it.

Use Power Words - Use words proven catch their eye and them to buy.

Easy Respond Procedures - In Direct Sales especially, you want to make it easy and obvious how they can respond to your offer, while you have they're attention.

Showcase Your Guarantee - With overwhelming abundance of Internet and Mail Fraud plaguing us, people need a guarantee.

Offer Insider Information - People like to think they are getting something Exclusive or Special.

To continue, I fired it up and names imported like a champ. About 10 times easier than Microsoft Access, I might add.

To de-dupe list, all I had to do was select "Find unique or distinct records."

In an instant my list was de-duped and ready for mailing!

Holy smokes!

Could it be that a database actually made something easy? What a relief. Next, I needed to export list so I could pull it into an email program.

I needed list in pipe delimited format separated by pipes that look like this: |

In database lingo, that's called a pipe.

Guess what?

It took only an instant in Approach. Again, I found it 100 times easier than Access. But I don't want to blame Access. I had downloaded some other databases from Net whose names I won't mention.

They were no easier to use for this simple task than Access was.

Finally, I talked to a friend of mine who is a techno whiz. He uses Q & A because he had problems using Access also. He makes lots of queries to Access to find customers who bought products one and two, or who bought within last 60 days and so forth.

He got quotes from database experts about making these queries and they told him how complicated it would be.

He does it in a flash with Q & A. I'm told that database isn't even marketed any longer. So I'm headed down to my used bookstore to see if they have an old copy.

And I'm also checking out query procedures in Approach. Interestingly enough, though, when I asked my friend if it was easy to de-dupe records in Q & A, he said he didn't know of a way to do it.

So there you have it.

Now, I only have a few more windmills left to joust. For example, my list of associates isn't clean.

Some of email addresses are in name field! Oh boy, have you ever tried to move data from one field to next?

You'd think you could select cell, and drag data to another cell.

Logical right?

Answer? Guess again bucko! Here's another, know all those ding dongs who type their names in capital letters? So when you suck their names into your database, it's in all caps? Then you send them email, their name is naturally in caps, and they email you back nasty things blaming you for screaming at them?

Of course, only after complaining to your ISP that you spammed them and capital letters are proof you're a novice who doesn't know yet that spamming is a no-no.

Well get this: In Q & A, you can hit a button and put all records in a column into caps and lower case.

Sure would be cool if you could do that in Approach or Access. You'd think there would be an email program that would also do this for you.

I mean, this being age of email and all...

Hey, for all you database gurus out there, I've put up a little discussion board you can visit and share your wisdom with rest of us database hacks.

And don't spam it with mlm ads or I'm putting YOUR email address in all caps, firing up my old database program, exportin' your name in pipe delimited and zippin' a nasty note off to your ISP about how caps prove you're a novice spammer who doesn't even know caps mean screaming!

:)

The board is at:

http://www.higherresponse.com/members/wwwboard/data.html