Why using Outlook for email marketing is a really bad idea?

A lot of people start making e-mail marketing (kind of) using Outlook or any other similar desktop program. Outlook is easy, powerful, affordable and -most of all- is widely pushed by Microsoft, so is what you find in almost any SME in the world; maybe in its free version (Outlook Express o Windows Mail) or Office Outlook, the really powerful version. I love Outlook and in fact it has been my e-mail client since its very first versions. I find it perfect as a Personal Information Manager and to send my everyday email.

However, when you need to do marketing campaigns to lots of people, things get very different. Size does matter, so it's not the same sending an email to a couple of customers than to send it to even so few as several tens or hundreds, not to mention to thousands of recipients.

The first problem is that you have no way to design a "compatible" e-mail, so that it is going to be correctly displayed in most e-mail clients out there. Your design looks great in your Outlook, and probably in the Outlook of other recipients, but is very probably breaking in other applications such as Thunderbird, GMail, HotMail, Lotus Notes, etc... What's worse: different versions of Outlook are incompatible when displaying email so, for example, your message crafted with Outlook 2007 is not displayed correctly when opened in Outlook 2003.

When you send an email to a huge list using your own Internet connection you are consuming a high bandwidth that impacts the other on-line activities in the company, and you normally have much more less bandwidth for sending information outside the company (upload) than for downloading it. Upon this, your e-mail provider -in order to prevent spamming- is probably blocking emails which have more than a few dozen recipients in it.

Maybe the worst problem you're facing is that of the "bounces" or wrong emails that get returned to the sender because of non-existent addresses, full mailboxes, and so on. The bounce rate could be sometimes a percentage of two digits, so if you're sending hundreds or thousands of emails expect to be flooded by bounced-back emails in your inbox. You need to cope with that and you need to clean your list manually. This could be a real pain and very error-prone.

Of course you don't have any idea of what is happening with your messages. Are people reading it?, How often?, Are they clicking on your links to get more information?, What things interest them the more?

There're lots of other things to take into account. This table summarizes some of them:

Conventional email clients are great for sending conventional emails, but are plain useful for making serious e-mail marketing and communication. Resort to a professional hosted email marketing service like MAILCast and, most of all, try to get professional training on the subject too.

You'll get:

• Messages that display well in all the email clients
• Not a single bit of your connection used for delivering the mailing
• Automatic bounce management
• A lot of interesting marketing stats and reports
• High deliverability

Related posts:

• Email marketing vs. postal mail marketing
• e-mailing: Hosted service vs. Desktop Application
• Why is a good idea to leave images on the server?
• BCC field: Be careful when sending an e-mail to multiple recipients
• TIP: How to manually test problems and bounces with e-mail addresses
• Mobile e-mail is going to replace SMS in the near future