
You can maintain a list of your personal contacts on Steel Spider. This list of
contacts is used by sellers to identify the approved bidders in auctions and to
send Offerings. Buyers can use the Contact List to send inquiries to some or all
of the people in their Contact List.
Start by clicking on the
Add a New Contact button and filling in
a name and email address. Save it by clicking
Save Contact. If
you are adding another person from a company in your contact list, there is dropdownbox
under Insert Company Address to the right of the form. Select the company name and
the address information will be inserted in the form so you don't need to retype
it. (If you have a number of people to add, attach an excel file to an email to
info@steelspider.com and we will import
the data for you.)
New contacts can be added:
- by clicking on the "Add New Contact" button on this page,
- by clicking on the "Add to Contact List" button displayed with a Steel Spider user's
detailed contact information, and
- by Steel Spider when a Steel Spider user requests your authorization to bid in one
of your auctions.
If you are a buyer sending Inquiries or a seller sending Offerings you will be sending
your emails to everyone in your Contact List. If you are running an auction you
need to specifically identify those in your contact list who are allowed to bid
and can not select "All Contacts".
To send an email to a subset of your contacts or run an auction, you can set up
groups. One group called New Contact is set up by default. This group is automatically
checked when a new contact is added to your list. This allows you to identify people
that were recently added to your list. You can have 9 groups. Click on the Manage
Group Names to rename a Group.
When you are ready to run an auction or send your email you can select the group
you created and the emails will only be sent to that group instead of to all your
contacts.
You can also export your list of personal contacts to an Excel file to backup the
data. When this Excel file is created is in Web Page or HTML format which is not
in the correct format to be recognized by MS Word and other programs for mail merge.
Open the File and select Save as.. and Save the file as a Microsoft Excel Workbook.
You can then set up a mail merge in a word or other document and use this Excel
file as the data source.
Manage Group Names
The Groups can be viewed, sorted and used to filter the displayed contact. This
section lets you rename and clear the entries in Groups.
If you are running an auction, you need to identify a specific group that contains
the list of your approved bidders for that auction. Place any approved bidders in
the group that contains your approved bidders. When you set up your auction select
the group that contains your approved bidders from the dropdown box next to "Approved
Bidder Group".