Marketing, Outlook and SharePoint
This question came into my email box this morning. Normally I push this kind of request over to Stump the Panel, but Richard’s question has pretty broad implications. I’m publishing it here to get community feedback before I put in my response.
My Marketing department approached me this week and they are interested in using SharePoint to manage their marketing campaigns. In particular, they were interested in the ability to manage contact lists. Sounds simple enough.
As I dug deeper, they want the ability to flag those contacts who no longer want to be included in their email marketing distribution. Since Marketing is one of your sweet spots I thought I would see what you know about using SharePoint for this purpose as well as Marketing in general.
Is the integration of SharePoint and Outlook good enough to manage a contact list and only send email marketing campaigns to those on the list who want to participate? Of course, I would be interested in any IP this or similar topics. — Richard
If they have Office 2007, then the answer is…. yes… sort of! You can connect a Sharepoint contact lists to outlook and create Email merges in Word 2007 based on the connected outlook list. The problem is the “flagged contacts” requirement. This requires a custom column (Yes/No) and this custom column will not show up in Outlook.
How do we get around that?
We can export the list to a spreadsheet and use that as our email datasource. Doing this will pull our custom yes/no column from SharePoint into the excel sheet. Then from Word 2007, we can filter the email recipient list based on the Yes/No “flagged contact” column and only send emails to those who aren’t flagged.
Hope I explained myself clear enough! Maybe somebody has a better way, but I currently don’t know of a way to…
Do an email merge in Word 2007 with a Sharepoint List as a datasource or
Pull custom columns from a sharepoint contact list into Outlook 2007
I also notice that things in Outlook Contacts such as “Categories” don’t get sync’d over to Sharepoint (No column to store the data, really) – so while you may be able to E-mail merge and filter by Category, you can’t manage the category in Sharepoint.
Greg’s ideas are the only options I have in mind.
The questions that are really being asked here are, “How do we comply with the CAN SPAM Act?”, which requires that people who unsubscribe from your mailing list are not sent future e-mails.
Therefore, you might need to do something like the following to comply:
1. Build a contact list in SharePoint that includes all of the e-mail addresses that you are sending the campaign to. If your primary contact list of people to send to is being fed from an external system or if e-mails are being entered by a group of internal people, you will need to check the “OK to send to” list against the “these people opted out” list.
2. Build a second contact list to hold those that choose to unsubscribe. This can be easily done by building a custom workflow with Designer (OOTB won’t allow you to do this) that: (1) moves an new unsubscribed user to the secondary contact list and (2) removes them from the primary list.
3. Then, when a new campaign is to go out, prior to hitting send, the “OK to send to list” should be checked against the “these people opted out” list so that you remain in compliance with the CAN SPAM Act. This will avoid you removing someone from the primary list and having some other person unknowingly add them to the “OK” list. Remember, the CAN SPAM Act is punishable *per occurrance*, so fines, if they are ever levied, can be substantial.
This allows you to keep the list of “OK to send to” pristine.
Hope these thoughts helped.
Lee, you are right on target. This is all about the CAN SPAM Act. How would this solution utilize Outlook? I would like to make this very easy for our Marketing team to use. I like the idea of managing the lists/content in SharePoint but I also want to have tight integration with MS Exchange / Outlook as this is a tool they are very familiar with. I am less familiar with the SharePoint / Outlook integration and would appreciate your thoughts.
Greg, I like your idea of connecting the SharePoint contact list to Outlook. I would appreciate anyone’s thoughts on how to make the “flagged requirement” visible to the Marketing team in Outlook. Our Marketing team is still on Office 2003 but this is hurdle I thing we can overcome. Good discussion. Thanks.
The only thing I can think of that may get this to work directly with Outlook to Sharepoint would be to design your own form and toss some VBA behind the scenes to control the data. Here’s a couple of links that are worth looking into:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012106101033.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930006/en-us
The last link says it’s for excel but it’s VBA, so it may help you. I’ve used the code before there was an actual plug-in to do the same thing and it works. But I’ve never had the need to try it in Outlook. This may work, but it may be a waste of time too… Not too sure at the moment but I think it’s worth looking into.
I believe Sharepoint is the swiss army knife of applications, but in this case I would recommend against using SharePoint. Your problem is such a common one – how to effectively communicate via email with customers – that there are probably thousands of dedicated services for this that would give you a lot more usability and features than a custom-built SharePoint/Outlook solution.
With the CAN-SPAM act and the relatively high risk of accidentally spamming (and losing) a potential customer, the stakes are too high to rely on a solution using Outlook. Plus, there are tons of other issues – HTML or text, a link to a web page if they can’t view in their email client, differences in display under different email providers, etc. There are so many services that have already figured this stuff out for you, it doesn’t make sense to try to build something on your own. Just my 2 cents.
Try looking at Mailchimp. Very reasonable prices (free for less than 500 subscribers) and tons of great features. I just started using them for a non-profit that I volunteer with.
Hi Caleb and thank you for your candid input. We are indeed considering services like Constant Contact and Mailchimp. I think the tough economic times causes us all to consider options where existing investments like in this case, SharePoint and MS Exchange, can replace green investment dollars even though the internal solution may pale in comparison depending on the level of effort we are willing to make. You point is well taken that we should consider risk vs. reward. Thanks.
Actually you can add categories to the contact list and have it show up in outlook. The only caveat is that it puts a # infront of the category. I did an email list for a municipality using wss about 6 months ago. It still has some drawbacks though when it come to ease of use.
My apologies if my comment seems out of line but Richard, aren’t your coworkers working off of a database already? It would make sense to add some type of indicator on that DB rather than add SP and all the complications that go with it to the process, wouldn’t it? Or, if Outlook IS the the DB being worked from, how about showing the marketing people how to group contacts into lists of “contactable” and “non-contactable” people within Outlook?
Don’t get me wrong, SP is a good tool, but if you can do what you need to more easily without it, why add the extra step(s)?
Cheers!