It’s always important to find the best for tool for any job. After all, you wouldn’t use an adjustable wrench to fix your watch, so why would you use Outlook to manage your email marketing campaigns?
What if every time you created and ran an email campaign you were unknowingly damaging your reputation? If you send bulk emails from Microsoft Outlook, that’s exactly what you’re doing. At first it will be imperceptible, but over time your digital reputation will suffer.
A company with a good reputation attracts more customers, and they’ll be willing to pay more for their products. There’s a reason why they say a good name is worth more than gold.
The problem is that reputations are difficult to manage, and even harder to measure. By the time you notice a problem, it’s too late and damage has been done.
You’re probably aware that Outlook has limits on the number of recipients you can mail to, per day and per message, but that’s not the end of the story. Even if you don’t go anywhere near those limits, it still matters. Here’s why: your IP address (that’s the unique identifier for each computer) has its very own digital reputation that’s automatically tracked and calculated in several different ways. Sending out bulk emails from Outlook can start a chain of events that will affect that reputation.
“Your communications could be blocked, and you won’t even realise. No one will tell you, you’ll just be wasting your money, time and again”
If you send out a newsletter to 50 people and one recipient flags the message as spam, the next time you send out a mailer it’ll be more likely to fall into other people’s junk folder. The effect is cumulative, so over time, more and more of your communications will be blocked and you won’t even realise. No one will tell you, you’ll just be wasting your money, time and again.
Outlook is a powerful tool. It’s much more than an email client. Microsoft describes it as a “personal information manager” the key word there is “personal”. There’s a tool for every job, and Outlook is versatile but it’s not the right tool for sending large scale email communications.
Aside from the very real possibility of being blocked by junk filters, you’ll be missing out on a wealth of functionality specifically designed to help email marketers. A really good email campaign needs more than a compelling message. For a start, it needs to be visually appealing. It needs to be measurable, beyond a simple read receipt. It should be integrated with different brand touch points, and a really good campaign also has a level of automation that helps the recipient progress through the marketing funnel at their own pace.
You can’t track reporting such as how many emails were delivered, how many bounced or how many people clicked on a link. Knowing this information is really important for the success of your future campaigns and your on-going marketing strategy. With Outlook you also can’t A/B test headlines and other elements, such as design so you can’t adjust to improve your performance. You’re basically flying blind.
Sending out mass mailings from Outlook is a false economy. You’ll be saving money in the short term by not using a dedicated email client, but over time you’ll be missing out on a great deal of useful functionality and even damaging your reputation.
In short – why shouldn’t you use Outlook to send mass emails:
- There are email send limits
- No reporting or analytics
- No ability to customise or target
- No automation
- Lack of design features
- No personalisation
- You could get blacklisted
Marketscan Edge is an email system for professional marketers
Dedicated email platforms offer many benefits for companies that run mass mailers, even if it’s something as simple as your company newsletter. With our Edge platform, you can create advanced email campaigns quickly and easily.
It has no upper limit on the number of emails you can send, and it comes with a suite of sender reputation monitoring tools. If your emails are being blocked, you’ll know about it, and you can take action – the best marketers are the ones with the best information. In fact, if you use our email system in conjunction with our properly targeted, segmented data, you’ll have nothing to worry about. All our award-winning data is regularly cleaned, verified and checked with rigorous quality control processes.
You don’t need to know HTML, our software has an intuitive user interface that works with a drag and drop system so you can create beautiful, attention-grabbing communications with integrated landing pages in just a few clicks. We’ll provide full training for you and your staff. We’ll help you set it up and if you need extra support, we can even manage the campaign for you, from start to finish. Our dedicated team of email marketing experts is here to provide customer service and technical support so you’ll always have someone on hand to give you the advice you need.
For more information about our leading email platform, or any of our products and services, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Contact us to find out how we can take your marketing campaigns to the next level.
