We don’t want to bash MS Outlook. It’s a good email program. It is fine for communicating with individuals and small groups who know each other.
It SUCKS as an email marketing program. There are so many reasons why. It is missing a ton of features you must have for your email campaigns. It cannot do double duty as a free email marketing tool.
Let’s cover a few of the missing tools:
- No authentication: This is the first tool on the list because it is the one that will cause a bunch of your emails to be blocked by the spam filters. When you send bulk emails in Outlook and the receiving email provider cannot authenticate who you are, a huge number of the emails never reach your subscribers.
Professional email providers have technology that communicates your identity and domain. Because the spam filters have that information, they feel confident that you are not a spammer.
2. Poor HTML: What can I say, the html you need to send out a professional looking email is important. The html in MS Word and Outlook is so faulty that it is a suspicious sign of a spammer.
3. No tracking of opens and clicks: Knowing how many of your emails are being opened is critical information to your email marketing campaigns. In addition, if they click on an offer in that email, it may be time for a sales person to call.
4. Manual unsubscribe requests and bounces: Unless you have a lot of time on your hands for handling this task, it make sense to have it happen automatically with a professional email provider.
5. Not fully integrated with client record: Marketing automation is taken up several notches when your online CRM is fully integrated with your email marketing. That way, everything about the customer is in one place. You can see what you sent them, if they opened it and what emails sparked enough attention to cause them to click.
6. All recipient emails are visible: You can make a whole bunch of people angry by sending an email to a large group of people that has a personal email address included. You may think that using BCC is the answer, but email servers see this practice as a sure indicator of a spam email.
7. Personalization is difficult at best: Do you want your recipients to be called by name? With a professional email provider, it is easy. With Outlook’s mail merge function it is cumbersome and undependable. It looks pretty stupid to get an email address to [customer]. Don’t take that risk.
Email marketing is a powerful way to deepen client relationships. When it is fully integrated with an online CRM that enables you to get reports and dashboards for monitoring recipient activity, it is a money maker. Don’t scrimp on this important tool for sales revenue. Your customers deserve better.