How To Send Email Newsletters Using Outlook
Sending out email newsletters is still one of the best ways to reach your customers. With a low cost for email, staying in touch (especially during a recession) is a good economical move. Unlike social media, email marketing can be one-to-one for a more personal feel, and you can have customers come directly to your website so that you can explain your proposition in full. Continue reading to find out how to send a newsletter in Outlook.
Tips on sending email newsletters:
- Do not use deceptive subject lines: Readers will find it very annoying if they expect to read about one topic and are then confronted by something totally different.
- Avoid ‘suspect’ keywords: There are certain words that are almost guaranteed to send a message to the anti-spam folder. Many of these words are related to consumer home finance or medication. A brief look at your own anti-spam folder should give you a very good idea of which words to avoid using if at all possible.
- Use high standards of grammar and punctuation: A badly written email will not necessarily get caught up in an anti-spam folder. It will, however, damage your credibility in the eyes of readers. It is therefore very important that you always carefully proofread an email before pressing ‘Send’.
- Always include links back to your website: Do not use marketing emails as a means of bombarding people with information. Your main aim should rather be to get people to visit your website as the primary place where they can do business with you. Many marketers make use of short articles with links to more information on their websites. This approach has the added benefit that it allows you to carefully track responses to your marketing efforts (e.g. by analyzing click-through rates).
- Always put your physical address on your emails: This is to comply with CAN-SPAM, the (US based) law designed to reduce the amount of unwanted emails people receive.
- Always make it simple and clear on how to unsubscribe: This is also to comply with CAN-SPAM. And, while it is the law, you would want to do this since it leaves you with a clean list of people who want to hear from you.
Once you develop your email marketing, it will be time to send your email newsletter. To raise response rates, you’ll want to send your emails so that it looks like you took the time to send to each recipient one at a time, with just their name in the To field. This is called a mail merge. You can put all your recipients in the BCC field, but this definitely raises the chances that your email will be flagged as spam.
How to send email newsletters using Outlook:
If you are in Outlook, you can do this by performing a mail merge with Microsoft Word. There are several issues that arise when performing a mail merge, for instance you cannot send email marketing with an attachment, or you can’t throttle how quickly the emails go out (if they send too quickly it could potentially lead your ISP to believe you are a spammer). However, it’s built in and free. You must start in Word, not Outlook.
Sperry Software has the Send Individually add-in to help you overcome these limitations and send email newsletters safely:
How to send email newsletters using the Send Individually add-in:
- In the main Outlook window, click the create new campaign button
- Decide whether you are sending to people in your contacts, or from a text file
- Compose the newsletter email
- Add any personalization text (for instance, first name)
- When you are ready, click the Send Individually button
The add-in will show you the first copy to make sure you’re happy with the work you’ve done, and then it will begin sending out the emails one at a time with just one recipient in the To field, as if you were sitting there rapidly typing out each email.
There are more features to the add-in (for instance sending attachments with the email newsletters and personalizing each outgoing email), but this is enough to get you into your recipients inbox.
Need more information?
Need to build your newsletter list with people that have already emailed you? Our Add Email Address add-in will create contacts out of people that have emailed you in the past.
Download a free trial version of the Send Individually add-in.
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