E-mail marketing firms Lyris and Pivotal Veracity have both updated their e-mail testing platforms to test e-mail rendering for Microsoft’s Outlook 2007.
The new version of Outlook 2007 has shown challenges in rendering e-mails designed with elements like Cascading Style Sheets, background images, and rich media like JavaScript, flash, and animation.
“We know how important it is for e-mail marketers to know that their e-mails will render correctly when they arrive in the inbox,” said Dave Dabbah, director of marketing at Lyris, Emeryville, CA. “That’s why we worked quickly to integrate Outlook 2007 into our EmailAdvisor toolset.”
Pivotal Veracity published a study titled, “A Design and Rendering Guide to the Outlook E-mail Readers.” It found that many rendering issues exist when sending to different e-mail readers. Among them were that e-mails render differently in different e-mail readers and that more e-mail readers are turning off images by default.
Deirdre Baird, president/CEO at Pivotal Veracity, Phoenix, recommended that marketers and designers test e-mails before sending, not only to Outlook 2007 recipients, but also to all recipients.
“I think there is a bigger opportunity here for e-mail marketers to take a look at the bigger picture of delivery problems across the board, since different e-mail readers render messages very differently,” she said.
