The Email Wars

Microsoft has launched a new add on that in Outlook 2007 can add some functionality to email priority scoring while at the same time give you a little more control over your time and inbox management. Why do I find this newsworthy to share with email marketers? Well I think that this could have an impact on how people get, read and respond to email. More importantly will it change the way that office workers and users of Outlook 2007 read and act on email marketing campaigns? It is way too early to know yet, but worth keeping on the radar. 

Example: What if your marketing emails and newsletters are giving a lower priority to other emails, are shoved down in the importance scale and left unchecked? Or even worse just mass deleted? Well this bodes well for office productivity but not for your campaigns. SO in thinking about this from a high and early level we should think about the importance of the relationship, how people are interacting and responding to our emails and take the subject line to a new level of importance in our campaign planning. 

How will this impact your campaigns? Or will it? That is yet to be known or determined, but if this application has some traction we might need to think about it more in our email marketing efforts and planning.

FROM CNET:

Microsoft Office Labs has launched a new product called E-mail Prioritizer that will not only sort through your in box to figure out what’s important, but also give you an honest-to-goodness pause button in case you want to escape an Exchange server e-mail avalanche.

Users must be running the latest version of Outlook (2007) and for now the tool is PC-only. After installing you’ll get a new toolbar menu option that lets you toggle on the do not disturb mode for a certain period of time or based on your meeting schedule. Once you return, or the timer runs out it’ll sync back up and grab new messages.

Unfortunately this is a client-side stop-gap on the way to having such an option on the Exchange server itself. Sure your server admin can put a pause on your account, but you can’t. This option simply turns off Outlook’s software-based e-mail antenna, so messages will still dutifully arrive on your mobile phone if you’ve got it set up to receive push mail.

To toggle the ‘away’ mode you can just use the drop down menu. This menu also lets you sort through prioritized e-mails.

The far more interesting half of this tool is the prioritizer itself. This will rate messages in your in box from zero to three stars. The ratings come from a system used by many folks, including several Microsoft employees I talked to back in March. For instance, e-mails sent to you and nobody else, or those from your bosses gets three stars, whereas mail you’re carbon copied on, or where you’re part of a large list scores far lower.

Read the Full Article on CNET