Email marketing has now become one of the top marketing methods, leaving behind the popular conventional marketing methods in the race. As we all know, internet has taken the front seat in our lives, and everything online is much more enticing to us. Hence, email marketing is definitely the most sought-after marketing strategy. It’s cost effective, environment friendly and can be accomplished without any hassle. Now, if you are wondering what email marketing is, it’s nothing but sending emails to target audience, in order to sell, or indulge the customers in buying any product or availing any service. So, in short, email marketing is sending advertisements and offers to customers and audience over email.
If you are planning to launch an email campaign for your customers, it is better that you take help of an email marketing software. But Microsoft Outlook can also be used for email marketing, even though it comes with several disadvantages. If you are a beginner and just want to try your hands out with creating mass email campaigns, then Outlook may be a good choice to begin with.
Steps To Create Mass Email Campaign With Outlook
However, before talking about the advantages and disadvantages of creating email campaigning with Outlook, let’s learn how to use Outlook for email marketing.
1. The first step is creating a mass email list in Outlook. For that, you need to visit the People application, select the contacts you want to send mails to and create the email list.
2. Next, go to Home and you will find an option Mail Merge from the Actions group. Select it.
3. The Merge Contact dialog box opens. Select the required contacts.
4. Next, go to the Merge To option and select Email option. Type the subject lines, click OK. This will redirect Microsoft Word to open automatically.
5. Now from the Mailings tab, select the Greeting line. Here, you can enter any greeting message for the customers, or simply skip it. If you click OK, then a greeting placeholder will be inserted in the Word document that has been opened automatically.
6. Now, create the body of the mail and finally click Finish and Merge.
7. Select the Send email messages option and enter the subject in the subject line text box. Click OK. All emails will be sent to the selected recipients.
Pros and Cons
I kept the Pros and Cons heading together because Outlook is not fit and enough for email campaigns. If I am to talk about the positive aspect of it, it is the simplicity, no additional requirement of newsletter tool, and that’s the thing. But there are many disadvantages in the list. Outlook is not a marketing application and thus it lacks creativity. Secondly, marketing emails sent over Outlook may not display properly at the audience end. Since, different versions of Outlook use different engines, and thus there is often a problem with compatibility. If your customers cannot see the mails properly, they won’t open your mails from the next time. It has also been seen that marketing mails sent over Outlook get accumulated in the Spam folder. If every or most mails of yours get into the Spam folder of your receiver, chances are there, that your email gets blacklisted. For all these disadvantages, Outlook is not a good option to choose for email marketing.