Outlook 2003 and email marketing

Had an interesting conversation with the head of our Communications Dept. this afternoon. She was having some difficulty with sending an HTML email to our members, and I helped her with that. In the course of helping her I happened to mention the "Death of Email Marketing" spiel that Chris gave at Gnomedex. I pointed out that with the release of Office 2003, Outlook would turn off images and HTML by default, and since most users never change the defaults, HTML newsletters would become almost pointless. I really think this is going to force a huge change in the way we send email, and I'm sure it will for bunches of other organizations. In fact, when you combine this change with the increase in the number of spam filters companies and ISP's are putting into place, (and Outlook's own spam filters!) you may end up with very few people ever seeing your message at all! For certain you'll never be able to know for sure how many people are getting it, and that's a problem. For us it's a problem because some people are depending on us to keep them informed, and will blame us if they never get any emails from us.

Will we end up using an RSS feed to push out our news and event information? Perhaps, but it needs to be adapted much more widely than it currently is before we pitch email in favor of that. Most of our members have no idea what a feed aggregator is, let alone have one installed. Outlook's new features may just help push things in that direction, and it'll be quite a change.
posted 8:46 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

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