Email Marketing News and Tips

Ideally every email reader would appear the same.  Whether recipients use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL … they’d all see the same thing.  A standardized email box would allow flexibility for marketers.  You could use flash, animated gifs and background colors and add forms into your email, including prefilled order forms. 

Apparently programmers weren’t thinking of this when creating Outlook 2007.  Since Office 2007 launched, there are millions of email users seeing  your messages  and probably thinking many of your emails don’t look so pretty.

Here are a few facts marketers should take into consideration when designing emails so they render properly in Outlook 2007:

Email marketing design limitations:

·        No support for animated gifs (only a static representation of the first frame displays).

·        No support for Flash or other plug-ins (a red "X" shows in the area where the Flash would display).

·        No support for background images (HTML or CSS).

·        Limited CSS support; no support for CSS floats or for CSS positioning. With the exception of color, CSS background properties are not supported; this includes background-attachment, background-position, background-repeat and background-image.

·        No support for HTML form submissions.

·        No support for JavaScript events, such as on mouse-down.

·        No support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists.

Issues to consider in the design process:

·        Outlook 2007 imposes a 2-pixel height minimum for cells. As an example, if an email contains 1-pixel transparent and a background color, the horizontal line will appear thicker than expected.

·        Stretched images (e.g., bars, borders, gradients, etc.) may not render correctly. All graphics should have their correct dimensions in the file properties. Do *not* rely on HTML-defined dimensions for images that are critical to the email’s layout.

·        Modules with fixed width and height may not display correctly for the same reason cited above. If horizontal and vertical spacing is determined by spacer graphics (as opposed to the email’s content), be aware that customized spacing and alignment may be impossible in some cases. For best results, try using a combination of transparent spacer images and the HTML height attribute on the cell."

Email should be used to drive traffic to a landing page where you have control over how you represent yourself and communicate your message.  There  you can get really creative. 

Useful links:
Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007, Part I:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007, Part II:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx