How-To: Use Email Marketing Service in Conjunction With Word 2007

Working from a home office means that marketing your own services is part of your workload as well. Drafting out a good newsletter or a marketing email, and then tracking all the relevant statistics is a completely unnecessary task, and one that can be automated easily.

Microsoft’s Email Marketing Service works using Outlook with Business Contact Manager to send out marketing emails to a targeted audience. In addition to actually sending out the mails, the service will allow the user to track the various responses, positive and negative, thereby becoming a valuable analysis tool.

The emails need to be sent using Outlook, where there are forms called the Marketing Campaign forms. These can be found in the File menu, under New. Marketing Campaigns are linked to the Business Contact Manager feature of Outlook, so to create a new Market Campaign, it is imperative that the Business Contact Manager should be accordingly configured.

The form contains an option for Delivery method, where Email Marketing Service should be selected. This will ensure that the wizard for the service will open automatically once the Launch button has been pressed.

Once the wizard opens, the process is simple, and the user is taken through it step-by-step.

As an alternative to Outlook, it is possible to create an email message in Word, and then use the Email Marketing Service from there. It can be found under the Mailings tab, in the Marketing section of the toolbar. Before doing this, the email message can be personalized for each recipient using mail merge.

The Mail Merge option will prompt the user for contacts, which can be selected from the Business Contacts. In the Write and Insert Fields, the user can position the personal information fields within the email message.

A vitally important part of any business, regardless of where it is run, requires feedback on marketing strategies and campaigns. This is where the service really proves its utility, as it is possible to track important figures like recipient data – who received the mails, who didn’t, which ones bounced, which ones were not delivered, and who opened the message. It is also able to track the responses to the email, if the recipient clicked on any links within the body of the message, which is a successful occurrence.

Email Tracking can be set up in the wizard, where one of the panes will present the option to the user. Selecting ‘Yes’ will set up the tracking service.