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Peter Labrow is a website professional with over twenty years’ experience in business-to-business marketing.
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The Outlook for e-mail marketing needs improvement
Posted by Peter Labrow on 31 October 2008
Even in a world of spam, e-mail marketing can be an effective, low cost and quick way to keep in touch with customers. But if you’re going to do it, do it properly – and avoid using tools such as Outlook.
If there’s one question I dread hearing, it’s “can you design me a template for my Outlook e-mailer?” This sounds innocuous enough, but there are many good reasons why these words strike fear into the heart of many a Web designer.
To cut to the chase, Outlook (and, in fact, pretty much every e-mail client) is just not fit to be used as an e-mail campaign tool.
There are several reasons for this:
- Outlook’s list management tools are very limited – all you’ve got is an address book, really.
- You don’t get any statistics or reporting after an e-mailer is sent.
- There’s no automatic way to handle unsubscriptions.
- Trying to lay out a nice-looking e-mail in Outlook (and most other e-mail clients) is like wrestling a walrus in jelly. You’d only do it if you really, really had to.
- The HTML generated by Outlook does not display at all well in other e-mail clients – the design often falls apart.
- Even if you create half-decent HTML templates, they don’t work well in Outlook – and Outlook 2007 can’t even handle them at all.
Just because Outlook is the world’s most-used mail client doesn’t make it suitable for use as a marketing tool. It’s tempting to use Outlook because you own it, and your address book is a ready-made mailing list. But quite honestly, it’s just not up to the job.
(It’s interesting that when clients show me well-designed e-mailers they’ve received, they are surprised to learn that Outlook and other mail clients aren’t remotely capable of sending anything similar.)
On many levels, sending an e-mailer is actually quite a complex process.
E-mailer design
First, we need a nicely designed e-mailer. This needs to be in HTML – but not ‘real’ HTML. The support for HTML in e-mail clients may seem universal, but most don’t support HTML properly at all. So, HTML written for an e-mail is ‘dumbed down’ – actually coded in a very out-of-date way, compared to how a Web page is coded. If HTML e-mails aren’t properly coded, the resulting e-mail may well look terrible in some e-mail clients.
A plain text alternative
We also need to provide for those who have their e-mail clients set to reject HTML, and display only plain text – so the same e-mail file also needs to contain an embedded plain text alternative.
Mailing list management
We need a mailing list, clearly. Preferably, this should be managed using a tool that allows people receiving e-mails to automatically unsubscribe from the list. It should also be able to detect ‘bounce’ e-mails (to addresses which are no longer valid) and should be able to provide statistics on our mailing campaign. We should be able to send e-mailers to just parts of our mailing list, if we want to.
Legal compliance
We also need to comply with the law – and with best practice. E-mailers should be sent only to those who have provided their permission to do so. E-mailers should always carry your postal address and a telephone number and have clear instructions on how to unsubscribe from your list – or, better still, provide an easy means for it to be done by simply clicking on a link.
Measurement
Like all marketing, there should be some form of measurement in place. This is ideally placed within the list management software and should provide reports on your campaigns – information such as the number of e-mails that have been opened, bounced – and the click rate from the e-mail to your website.
That’s a whole bunch of stuff that Outlook can’t do. So what’s the answer?
Dedicated e-mail marketing tools
There are lots of great e-mail campaign management tools. Many of these are available as on-line services, so there’s no software to install. You pay for them based on usage and they contain all of the tools you need. These include:
Our favourite is MailChimp, which is powerful and actually lives up to its claim to be fun to use. However, other systems offer similar services.
- It has a list manager, to which you can upload your current mailing list.
- You can easily integrate a sign-up form into your website (or, if you want to be really slick, use its API to integrate it seamlessly into your site).
- It has a WYSIWYG e-mailer editor, which can create good-looking results really easily. It has lots of templates on which to base your design, including punchy images – so you don’t need to be a designer to create a great-looking e-mail.
- It sends combined HTML and plain text e-mailers, so your message is more likely to get through.
- It adheres strictly to best practice – and prompts you to adhere to the law, helping to make your e-mailers compliant with legislation like the US’s CanSpam Act. (In fact, all accounts are manually vetted and approved, based on your mailing list and the type of e-mailers you are going to send, to make sure you’re not a spammer.)
- It has extensive help, making it easy for beginners to get to grips with the whole process of managing an e-mail campaign.
- It provides really good reporting, so you can follow the progress of a campaign.
Composing an HTML e-mailer, using the powerful editor. All of that HTML nonsense is taken care of for you, unless you are of a technical bent, in which case you can edit the code too.
Campaign statistics, showing how many of your e-mailers have been received, opened, and how many people have clicked through to your site.
Can Outlook give you anything like this kind of marketing intelligence?
Yes, it’s quick and convenient to send e-mails from Outlook, but there’s no comparison against using a dedicated tool. Outlook campaigns are like dropping leaflets from an aeroplane, flying a mile up: you’ve no idea who’s got your e-mailer – if anyone. You don’t even know if it’s going to look half decent when it arrives.
If you want to keep in touch with customers via e-mail, then it should be properly planned and implemented – like any other form of marketing.
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