Why Outlook 2007 is good for email marketing.

Much has been written about the Outlook 2007 HTML rendering saga. (OL07 is using the Word rendering engine instead of IE) With most email marketing solutions geared towards IE this has caused more than a few email creatives to get booted out of beauty camp. This backward step, believe it or not, is good for email.

First up, MS have published a very clear list of the HTML elements that no longer work in OL07. Guess what? A lot of these never worked in Lotus Notes either. After Outlook, Notes is the next biggest corporate email client. So by tripping up this segment, the OL07 team have unwittingly caused marketers to re-examine email best practice.

It isn’t readily apparent that HTML design for email is a different animal to HTML design for websites. Dropping website creative into email does happen and OL07 has put a stop to that gallop. It is common enough to assume that website HTML will work across the major email clients. It never did in the first place and what OL07 does is to make that glaringly obvious. With a huge share of the corporate market this cannot be ignored. In short the backward step by OL07 is going to help email creatives get better deliverability rates into the corporate inboxes of Outlook and Notes.

Next up, MS published a free OL07 rendering validator that can be plugged into design tools like Dreamweaver and Expression Web. We examined a number of campaigns and those derived from website creative got the red flags. So it may not be HTML best practice but better looking email in the inbox can only be a good thing.

7 steps to better email:
1 Do use HTML tables with a container table wrapping up header, content and footer
2 Don’t use FLOAT as a means of laying out your email
3 Do use SPAN tags instead of DIV tags
4 Don’t specify CSS styles in the HEAD tag, use inline styles instead
4 Do set the width on wrapper tables to a fixed pixel width instead of a relative percentage
6 Don’t use CSS background image/color use Table background image/color instead
7 Do Run the rendering validator tool against your final HTML

Reference:
Microsoft OL07 Rendering validator tool (free)