Informing Customers and Employees during the COVID-19 Crisis

How can you keep customers and employees informed while self-isolating, social distancing or in quarantine?

While there are many messaging and chat-based tools available, email is still a very effective tool for staying in touch with customers and employees.

In this post we look at how you can send/blast out similar (and also customized) emails to your own mailing lists using Outlook.

Why emails?

One of the reasons for this is that during this crisis, we are not “always at work when we should be” while remote working. We may be away from the computer to do something important… to tend to our children (who are also home from school) … or we may be getting ourselves one more snack that we don’t need.

Emails are less likely to be missed because we are all “trained” to look at our Inbox (too) many times each day.

So how can you send out these emails?

One-to-one/few emails are easy… but how do you send out newsletter-style announcements to customers or employees… where you need to send the (almost) same information to everybody.

There are online tools to do this but you will get better deliverability if you send out your emails using Outlook. Your emails are more likely to get into their Inbox, and not end up unread in Junk or Clutter folders.

Here are 3 ways you can use Outlook to send out email blasts to groups of people:

1. Create one email and add all the recipients to the CC or BCC field (this will work but is not recommended, particularly for sending to customers because it can affect deliverability and looks unprofessional)
2. Send out emails to Distribution Lists
3. Use a tool like EmailMerge Pro for Outlook (works with Outlook contacts, distributions lists, Excel files and Salesforce contacts)

Thousands of customers of are already using Email Merge Pro for Outlook around the world. There are a number of advantages to using EmailMerge including:

1. Emails are more likely to be delivered to the Inbox (instead of Junk or Clutter)
2. You can use Excel spreadsheets as your mailing list (without needing to type in all the email addresses into Outlook again).
3. More professional: Each recipient gets their own separate email (which can be personalized with their name and other details).
4. You can use Tracking features to know who has opened an email (or clicked on a link)

While Email Merge works with Outlook contacts, Distribution Lists and Access databases, we find that many users use Excel. If that is you, you can find more information below: How to Email Merge from Excel and Outlook.

We hope that this article helps you stay in contact during these difficult times. We are planning more articles on remote working with Office 365 in the next few days (Contact us on news@standss.com with questions if you have specific questions).

In the meantime, you can download and try a fully functional trial version of Email Merge.