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With the release of Outlook 2007, email marketers face new challenges in the design of their marketing messages. Outlook actually takes a step backwards with HTML email rendering, so emails now have further limitations and require additional testing to ensure proper display.

The lowdown is that in Outlook 2007, HTML email will be rendered using the Microsoft Word HTML engine. Previous versions of Outlook used the Internet Explorer engine. The Word engine is predictably much less robust, and lacks features that were supported years ago in the IE engine.

Some important changes to understand:

1. No background images and colors. Background items are stripped out or inconsistently supported in Outlook 2007.
2. No animated GIFs. Animated GIF files will not animate. They will remain static on the first frame of the animation.
3. ALT tag changes. Preceding your ALT tag you’ll find the text “Right-click to display images Outlook 2007 has disabled…” so your ALT copy may be pushed out of view.
4. No CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Using CSS was not recommended before the release of Outlook 2007, and as the new release does not support this feature, CSS should definitely not be used when coding emails.
5. Reduced standards compatibility Because the “new” HTML engine in Outlook 2007 is actually older than the one it replaced, it doesn’t have the benefits of recent bug fixes. So even some relatively simple HTML code may not display correctly.

The decreased HTML rendering abilities of Microsoft Word means email design techniques that looked fine in Outlook 2004 (or other email clients) may not look good – or be displayed at all – in Outlook 2007.

So you may be asking, “How soon will Outlook 2007 impact my email campaigns?” Early analyst results indicated a slow first year adoption rate of only 15% of PC users (source: PC World) compared to the first year conversion of only 12-14% of PC users for Windows XP. Yahoo News reported “initial results indicated the adoption rate was about 4% less than it was for Windows XP”. So rushing changes to your template and campaigns is not required, but starting to address the changes required by Outlook 2007 is in your best interest.

As always, the most important thing you can do to ensure consistency across all email clients, Outlook 2007 included, is to design your emails for best practices, and then test your message in as many email applications and web-based services as possible.

Tags: bestpractices, css, outlook, outlook2007, rendering

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