With many people embracing email as a de-facto standard for day to day business communication, MS Outlook – in it’s various guises – is where most people hold their email contact data and, perhaps not surprisingly, Outlook is often where people may take their first steps into email marketing. Whilst Outlook is fine as an email client, it really doesn’t ‘cut the mustard‘ as a tool for businesslike email marketing. For more details, check out our post on what to look for in a good email marketing tool. One of the biggest barriers to using e-newsletters to keep in touch with customers, prospects and other contacts can be building a database to use as a list. I have seen numerous cases where people have been MANUALLY retyping data from one computer list to another – simply because they don’t know how to access the data electronically. While I don’t recommend Outlook for email marketing, equally I don’t think having to retype reams of data is acceptable either. The export tool in Outlook is OK but it can be a bit unwieldy – and if you have a system where you use public folders to make information available to all team members, Outlook Export does not directly recognise these – not ideal! There is however a simple, free Outlook plug-in which talks a straightforward ‘select and click‘ approach to Outlook data export. With CodeTwo Outlook Export installed, you simply select which data group you want to export (in our case this would be ‘shared contacts’ ), click the CodeTwo button: – on the Outlook Toolbar, select which fields you want to export then click GO – and your selected data is dumped to a standard, comma-separated file which can be manipulated (normally in Excel or similar), opened, or imported to another programme (e.g. your email marketing system) as required. You can download the plug-in here Installation and use is straightforward but if you have any questions, feel free to give me a call
