The Email Standards Project is working hard to persuade email client developers to adhere to HTML web standards so that email has a better chance of appearing as it was designed to across the majority of email programs. It’s a very noble effort.
Recently, thousands of people joined the dedicated team at the Email Standards Project to send a message to Microsoft, who is going back in time with plans to use MS Word as the rendering standard for Outlook 2010 – even though that is sooo 1989.
They did receive a response from Microsoft, who said that they appreicate the concern and that, well, yea – the check is in the mail. Actually they said “The mosaic is hangning in our hallway.”
Because this sort of carry on can get a bit confusing, I thought I’d create a little comic strip to explain what’s going on.
* To see this and other comic strips by The Messaging Times, just click the strip!
Email marketers routinely have a difficult time getting their carefully crafted HTML emails to look right in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. This is largely due to Microsoft using MS Word as their benchmark for HTML design. Of course, most email marketers do not create their messages in MS Word. Why would they when the majority of email clients don’t support this format – and messages created in Word will not look right in the majority of email clients.
As usual, the team at the Email Standards Project are on the case.
“…After testing the latest beta of Outlook 2010 and seeing the same poor standards support as 2007, a senior member of the Outlook team confirmed they plan on continuing to use Word to render HTML emails. Not only that, but early tests indicate that HTML support in the Word engine has not been improved in any way. Same bugs. Same quirks…” keep reading and see some screenshots
The Email Standards Project is calling on all of those who are frustrated with Outlooks proprietary approach to email rendering to send a clear and unified message to the Microsoft Team.
“…All you have to do is tweet your thoughts about this issue, and make sure you include the fixoutlook.org URL somewhere in the tweet. We’ll be pulling together every tweet that includes this link on the fixoutlook.org site to send a unified message to Microsoft. The more tweets, the more impact, so please start spreading the word today and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same…”
So, if you’re tired of non-standard approaches to HTML email and want to get your email to look good, even in Outlook, get involved.
Thanks to the guys and gals working hard for us at the Email Standards Project!
On more than one occasion, we have discussed the importance of heeding image suppression and rendering when composing email campaigns. Because of the lack of HTML email standards, your lovely images (and more importantly your key message, call-to-action and preview content) probably won’t be seen in the preview pane of your recipients’ inboxes if images are suppressed by default. Currently, this is the case in about 50% of all email clients.
Today, Chad White published an interesting study that looks at how retail email marketers are dealing with image suppression and rendering issues which affect the display of HTML email.
Here’s an overview of his findings:
- Only 42% of leading retail email marketers were using designs that balanced HTML image and text use, which is one way to combat image suppression problems.
- 23% of emails received by those reviewed in the study were completely unintelligible due to image suppression.
- Only 3% of retail email marketers surveyed use HTML call-to-action buttons rather than images.
For more a full summary of the study, read Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study
This is another reason why it is so important to test your campaigns against a variety of email clients prior to sending it out to your live list.
