Look Out!

Rather than the awe-inspiring equivalent of a moon landing as Microsoft had hoped, the rollout of Outlook 2007 instead has been greeted by the business community as a giant leap backward for e-marketing.

That’s because Outlook 2007 regularly mangles most higher end image- and animation-dependent marketing e-mails, due to Microsoft’s decision to “dumb down” Outlook’s design and image-rendering capabilities.

“Microsoft has taken e-mail design back five years,” says David Greiner, co-founder of Campaign Monitor, an e-mail tool provider.

The problem’s been further compounded by the rollout of Vista, Microsoft’s new Windows operating system. It has forced consumers and businesses to adopt Outlook 2007 whether they want to or not.

Users’ reception to Vista has been cool. But the system has established a beachhead as the preferred operating system for a significant percentage of users.

Essentially that means most users looking to get the most from Outlook on a Vista system most likely will want to add a Vista-compatible version of Outlook 2007 to their PCs.

For multichannel marketers, the inevitable migration to Vista and Outlook 2007 will translate into e-mails in which much of the imaging and layout simply will be rendered inoperable.

No Backgrounds?
Take nested background colors, for example. These are relied upon extensively in marketing e-mails to set off one part of a message from another. But they can no longer be expected to render properly for all those new users of Outlook 2007. Any background color nested within another element of a message will not render properly.

Ditto for attempting to use advanced programming for simple positioning of images and other elements. Outlook 2007 shreds these design touches as well.

Simple design flourishes, such as standard margins and the padding that’s often used around images and text to give HTML messages a finished look, won’t work either.

Higher-end graphics, such as animated GIFs and Flash presentations, also have been tossed on the digital trash heap. In fact, any placement of Flash in an e-mail message received in Outlook 2007 merely shows up as an “X.”

Such restrictions spell trouble for catalogers like Steichen’s Sporting Goods, Salomon and Girlz Clothing/Citrus Motorsports (see e-mail samples above and on Pg. 31). In these cases, Flash content won’t render correctly in Outlook 2007. Instead, an “X” will appear in the e-mail where Flash animation should be if they repurpose Flash content in an e-mail marketing campaign.

And remember those handy, embedded e-mail surveys, along with all the other interactive forms you used to drop into your e-mails? They’re not renderable for people who use — or will use — Outlook 2007 as their e-mail reader. A survey like the one on the American Library Association store (www.alastore.ala.org), for example, stands little chance of rendering properly in Outlook 2007.

Split Personality
Microsoft’s reasoning is that the old Outlook had something of a split personality. The software used MS Word to compose HTML messages and Internet Explorer to display the same messages.

Word’s HTML rendering engine was much weaker than the one in Explorer. Sometimes messages got mangled in the transition. So Microsoft dumbed down the entire process and let MS Word’s weaker HTML engine handle the composing and displaying of e-mail messages.

“Internet Explorer 7 was never intended to be an editing tool,” says Salima Valji, a Microsoft Web manager. “That’s why we made the decision to use Word’s new HTML rendering engine for both reading and authoring content.”

While a convenient solution for Microsoft’s programmers, it’s been a design catastrophe. “This is a game changer,” Campaign Monitor’s Greiner says. “The reality is that many of us are going to have to scale back our e-mail templates to years past. Perhaps if we get together as a community and tell Microsoft how damaging this change really is, we can encourage some real change.”

For now, here are some tips seasoned e-marketers recommend for getting around Outlook 2007:

1. Pivotal Veracity, an e-mail deliverability company, has a 43-page PowerPoint presentation (pivotalveracity.com) that details what’s wrong with Outlook 2007. This is a great first stop to get an in-depth, visual appreciation of just what you can and can’t do from an e-marketing perspective.

2. Check out Microsoft’s specifications on the problem. The software giant has published its own technical explanation of what can and can’t be done on Outlook 2007 (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx).

3. Get an e-mail preview program. A number of e-mail marketing software firms offer e-mail previewing — the ability to preview how an e-mail will look in every major e-mail reader — as part of their tools suite. See software from Lyris Technologies, Return Path, Pivotal Veracity and Litmus.

4. If you’re already designing for Web-based e-mail, you’re in luck. Multichannel marketers successfully creating messages for browser-based e-mail programs like Gmail and Hotmail should miss the hit on this one. The “dumbed down” HTML design options available in those programs essentially mimic Outlook 2007’s new limitations.

5. Go simple. Ben Chestnut, a partner with e-mail marketing firm The Rocket Science Group, has been advising his clients to keep their e-mail messaging simple for years. That’s because there are many different e-mail programs and many variations between standard e-mail and Web-based e-mail. Designing for so many different rendering possibilities is a marketer’s nightmare. “What’s wrong with simplifying our HTML designs?” he wonders. “Why not worry about the message more than the wrapper?”

6. Don’t allow messages to be image dependent. Given the fact that Outlook 2007 will strip out your images if you don’t design things just right, make your e-mail intelligible even if the images don’t show up for the reader.

7. Post a Web version of your pitch. Embedding a simple link in your e-mail inviting readers to click to the Web for another copy of your message saves everyone all sorts of trouble.

8. Speak up. Word on the street is that Microsoft is well aware of the gnashing of teeth over Outlook 2007, and has indicated it’s willing to listen. One way to get your voice heard is to post your grievance on Molly.com. It’s a blog maintained by Molly Holzschlag, a Web standards advocate who’s also a member of the Microsoft/WaSP Task Force (www.webstandards.org).

Joe Dysart is a business consultant and freelance writer based in Thousand Oaks, Calif. You can reach him at (631) 256-6602 or joe@joedysart.com.