Outlook may be the most popular email program in the world, but that does not mean it is the right choice for your email marketing campaign. Outlook was originally designed for office use, and it is still the perfect choice for that application. But the same things that make Outlook a great choice for business use make it a poor one for email marketing campaigns. If you are thinking about launching your next marketing campaign using the Outlook platform you might want to think again.
The Risk of Blacklisting
There are a number of risks associated with using Outlook as part of your next email marketing campaign, but blacklisting is certainly the most serious. Even the best email marketers run the risk of being branded a spammer. If your account is branded as spam, your entire domain could be blacklisted. That means none of your emails, including work-related ones, will go through until the blacklist is lifted.
Outlook gives users the ability to ability to report any email message they get as spam. This is a useful feature for office workers, but it poses a real risk for email marketers. It is all too easy for a disgruntled – or just distracted – user to label a message as spam. This in turn can cause real problems for legitimate marketers and derail their expensive and carefully executed publicity campaigns.
Bulk Mail Support
Another problem with Outlook is that the platform was never designed for sending bulk emails. Since Outlook was designed primarily for office use, the program lacks the kinds of features that other platforms offer. For instance, Outlook does not allow senders to tell when an email has been opened or when a link has been clicked. This makes it difficult for marketers to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. It is better for marketers to use programs that provide these advanced features, rather than rely on Microsoft Outlook.
In addition to these serious problems, it is difficult to create an maintain a true brand identity using Microsoft Outlook as your platform. Branding is a critical part of marketing today, and using a generic program like Outlook reduces the effectiveness of any branding campaign. Using a dedicated email marketing tool, like SendBlaster, instead allows marketers to grow their brands and build their reputations.
When beginning an email marketing campaign it can be tempting to fall back on the familiar and go with what you already know well. Since many of us use Outlook to send and receive email at home and at work, there is no learning curve required. That means that many beginning email marketers will make the same mistake and rely on this popular office program to build their campaigns. As we have seen in the above examples, that can be a very bad idea as well. Every program has its niche, and Outlook’s niche is clearly the office environment.
From the risk of being labeled a spammer to the lack of reporting tools, there are a lot of reasons why marketers should avoid using Outlook in their campaigns. It was never designed to be a bulk sending service – and its limitations show why it is not suitable for this purpose.