Outlook 2007: Is Microsoft an ESP?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow
In all the fuss about Outlook 2007 and email design, another interesting aspect of Microsoft's new product seems to have slipped through the net. Reader Marc Krisjanous of Mobilize Mail brought this to my attention.
The version of Outlook that comes with Office Small Business 2007 and Office Professional 2007 includes Business Contact Manager.
And Business Contact Manager now includes --- for the first time -- an email marketing service, allowing the Outlook user to build email lists from her contacts database, send marketing emails to the list, and track responses. Just like you might do with a conventional ESP.
The mechanism for doing this appears to be integration with Microsoft's Listbuilder. This was an email marketing service promoted as part of the bCentral brand and suite of services for small business (which stopped taking new sign-ups last year.)
It's hard to find anyone recommending a standard email client for managing email marketing. But integration with Listbuilder might address some of the relevant issues, like reporting.
Though it's hard to judge without using the service, I'm still skeptical. Outlook is not the ideal environment for creating emails and managing subscribers. And conventional ESPs provide a lot of ancillary benefits in terms of customer education, support, advanced subscriber management, tracking, reporting, email deliverability etc. I don't know how much of that is included in the Business Contact Manager service.
If anyone has experience with (or thoughts on) the new software, I'd love to hear from you.
More on email marketing services | Tags: email marketing, business contact manager, outlook 2007, email marketing service
The version of Outlook that comes with Office Small Business 2007 and Office Professional 2007 includes Business Contact Manager.
And Business Contact Manager now includes --- for the first time -- an email marketing service, allowing the Outlook user to build email lists from her contacts database, send marketing emails to the list, and track responses. Just like you might do with a conventional ESP.
The mechanism for doing this appears to be integration with Microsoft's Listbuilder. This was an email marketing service promoted as part of the bCentral brand and suite of services for small business (which stopped taking new sign-ups last year.)
It's hard to find anyone recommending a standard email client for managing email marketing. But integration with Listbuilder might address some of the relevant issues, like reporting.
Though it's hard to judge without using the service, I'm still skeptical. Outlook is not the ideal environment for creating emails and managing subscribers. And conventional ESPs provide a lot of ancillary benefits in terms of customer education, support, advanced subscriber management, tracking, reporting, email deliverability etc. I don't know how much of that is included in the Business Contact Manager service.
If anyone has experience with (or thoughts on) the new software, I'd love to hear from you.
More on email marketing services | Tags: email marketing, business contact manager, outlook 2007, email marketing service
Permalink | March 08, 2007 |
1 comment(s)
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1 Comments:
If sales people would use their internal Outlook "Business Contact Manager" to send emails to their prospects (i.e. those who haven't opted-in for email marketing), instead of using an email service provider (typically built for permission marketing) this is a good thing for ESPs.
Next time a sales person tries to use our ESP to "blast an email to people I met at a tradeshow 5 years ago" we'll definitely be recommending they use Outlook 2007 instead.
By 
Ben, on
08 March, 2007
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