The Bottom Line
More powerful mail merging, segmenting and automation could further improve an already excellent product.
Pros
- PoliteMail integrates professional email marketing into Outlook superbly and seamlessly
- Pieces of content and templates can be shared among users, and PoliteMail analyzes results in detail
- PoliteMail offers simple mail merging, split testing and full list management including segmenting
Cons
- Mail merging could be enhanced with custom fields and further automation
- PoliteMail inherits some interface hurdles from Outlook
Description
- PoliteMail brings fully featured email marketing to Outlook.
- Contacts and lists are managed inside PoliteMail, flexible search, segmenting and automatic A/B tests possible.
- A PoliteMail is composed like a normal email message in Outlook — with added benefits.
- You can use ready-made templates or create your own. Content can be shared with other users.
- Editing the HTML source is possible, and links as well as attachments (kept on PoliteMail servers if big) can be tracked.
- PoliteMail records and analyzes open rates, clicks, forwarding, replies and more.
- Addresses can be imported from CSV files, captured on your site or taken from emails in Outlook.
- PoliteMail makes adding unsubscription links and communication preferences easy, handles bounces.
- PoliteMail's content tools and tracking options work for individual emails just as well.
- PoliteMail supports Windows 2000/3/XP/Vista and Outlook 2002/3/7.
Guide Review - PoliteMail 2.0 - Outlook Email Marketing Add-On
Superb integration with Outlook means you can use PoliteMail easily and start instantly, but it also brings with it some of Outlook's clumsiness. That distracts from the impressive set of features and possibilities only mildly, however.
List management is not PoliteMail's best discipline, but it still musters flexible search, easy categorization and automatic bounce handling as well as A/B tests. PoliteMail can even segment lists for you based on recipient behavior.
Content creation is PoliteMail's forte: you can choose from a number of nice templates and add your own, save parts of messages (text, links, graphics, paragraphs and attachments) for later use, and share it all with other users for consistency of excellence.
You can even edit the HTML manually, though adjusting the plain text alternative of a rich email is not possible. If you have a logo and a name, PoliteMail helps you set up a classy signature including both.
PoliteMail's tracking pleases with not only beautiful graphics but also detailed versatility (opening rates, clicks and attachments can all be analyzed). Having data available in export-friendly form would be nice.
