Outlook 365 Configurations for Email Campaign Success

Michael Compisi we switched to Sugar Market last year, but for about two years we used the Sugar Sell campaigns. The config was a fair amount of trial and error with O365. Since then it looks like the added "Exchange Online" which I assume is O365 settings. We actually used a 3rd party SMTP service to get around the problems with O365 and Sugar.

We did not receive emails into Sugar, only sent emails through campaigns.

I'd be glad to show you how I configured it if you want to do a Zoom or something.

Hey John.  Thanks for the reply.  I'd be very keen on show and tell. I'd want to get my tech guys involved so they can see what you did and try to mirror it. If you can share some times/options with availability in the next week or so, I'd be grateful.

Following as we are using Sugar Sell in one instance and my test email/campaigns get bounced with no hits...  We are utilizing O365 as of a recent change also.

I am not sure what time zone you are in, but I could do something after 2pm CDT tomorrow, at 12pm CDT Monday, or after 1pm CDT on Wednesday the 21st. After that I will be on vacation and won't be able to do it until August 6th.

Shoot me an email jkitsmiller@karpel.com

According to our customers' experience, it is fairly risky to use the regular mailing system for sending campaigns - in case some discussive target list is applied for mail merge -for the reason or not, - it may take just a few hours for the domain went blacklisted - along with all the regular mailing capabilities down. And yes, it does take time and efforts to get even the regular mailing back to normal.

There is maybe a hundred of adhoc marketing services - emailing services (send then track email campaign) and maybe dozens of marketing automation systems  (automated nurturing , sometimes omnichannel) on the market -  for all kinds of expectations and wallets – and they could make marketing experience if not exciting but at least less painful.

We "successfully" email out of Sugar using Campaigns and from the Emails Module using shared mailboxes. The configuration was a lot of trial and error. We also have incoming email operational both to create cases and also to handle campaign bounces. (We only experience genuine bounces). Our configuration does not cater for users emailing from their email address - see ongoing issues i next paragraph.

Despite this, there are still some ongoing problems that do not affect us day to day that need improvement and we have logged those issues with SugarCRM. Whilst there are some issues on the Office 365 side, SugarCRM could definitely improve the process within Sugar as well.

Recently we experienced some very bizarre behaviour with a customer that was definitely an issue with Office 365 so that doesn't help either.

If you don't get this resolved with others in your time zone, let me know and we can organise an online call. (I'm in Australia AEST)

I'd suggest using a dedicated email marketing platform, apart from all the features and benefits, you also avoid having your email server IP blacklisted which will in turn affect deliverability of your normal day to day emails from the same email server.

I understand costs for something like Sugar Market may be too high for a small business, but there are many much lower cost options out there.