Outlook Contacts are a great place to drive high priority information about key contacts into and drive priority workload out of, with a link back to the contact itself. It is clearly Best Practice relationship and workload management to use our contact database well. So, how can you create an Outlook Contact from an email?

It is so simple. There are 2 methods. I will set out my preferred one first.

This method is favoured because it allows us to enter all key contact information into the various Contact Form areas very simply.

  1. You have opened an email and decide you want to add the sender to your Outlook Contacts list. Once you have done what you want to do with the email, close it
  2. Now, with the email closed and still highlighted in your inbox, simply left click – hold down and drag the closed email over your Contacts folder and release.
  3. You will see that this opens a new Outlook Contact form with the sender’s name and email address already in place. This is not enough information for good relationship, priority and workload management  so you need to populate other key fields. That’s easy!
  4. Scroll down the text of the embedded email within your Contact notes area and find the signature. Now simply highlight and drag the various contact information from the signature to the appropriate fields in the contact form. Simple!
  5. Once you have all the contact information in the appropriate fields simply delete the rest of the text.

The second method is to create an Outlook Contact from an open email but you have to populate the other fields manually so I consider it the weaker option. It is included here for completeness:

  1. In the open email, right-click on the sender’s name and select ‘Add to Outlook Contacts’
  2. You will see that the ‘Name’ , ‘File As’ and ‘Email address’ fields have been populated and you need to manually complete the rest.

Naturally, if you are looking for Best Practice training or speaking services in key relationship management and priority workload management just get in touch