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Pivotal Veracity upgrades deliverability solution with critical multi-language email message rendering and design validation tools. February 17, 2005 - Pivotal Veracity announced today the addition of a comprehensive solution for analyzing and resolving message design and construction problems that impact accurate rendering of permission-based emails and inbox delivery. Unlike simple rendering tools that allow mailers to view what their email "looks like" in different email clients, Pivotal Veracity's new diagnostics focus on providing clients with a comprehensive and actionable solution that delineates exactly why the message is rendering improperly and what must be done to fix it. Current "Viewers" un-actionable. "We considered incorporating a viewer as it's certainly fun and novel to view how your email looks in different email clients but we learned after months of testing that that's all it is - fun and novel - and even that quickly wears thin," says Deirdre Baird, President of Pivotal Veracity. "The reality is that clients want to know why their email is rendering improperly and what exactly they need to do to fix it. There are hundreds of combinations of email clients and browsers and not only would it be a practical impossibility to view your email across all combinations but we learned it is unnecessary as the fundamental reasons most emails are not rendering properly are directly related to incorrect email construction." "We consistently view our emails in a select list of key email clients as well as rely on our email deployment vendor to advise if we have design problems; however, neither reveal the underlying problems with our email code and we were quite surprised to learn how many we had. Pivotal Veracity's solution provides a detailed breakdown of each issue so we could quickly and effectively fix the problem. Increasing the likelihood our emails will render properly is far easier by directly addressing the problem rather than spending hours looking at our email in different email-clients - a solution that was not only time-consuming but provided little to no insight as to where or what the problem might be." - marketing manager, multi-channel publisher. Foreign character sets and different (x)HTML versions mandate more robust validation. Despite advancements in email design, as many as nine out of ten emails still have problematic HTML code. Compounding this problem is the use of generic "HTML Validation" tools that analyze emails across a generic set of HTML code guidelines instead of specifically applying W3C and WDG requirements for different (x) HTML versions and encodings. Pivotal Veracity's solution not only applies both recognized standards but automatically detects and validates across every significant version of HTML, ISO-HTML, and XHTML from the old HTML 2.0, to the commonly used HTML 4.01 Transitional as well as the most recent version of XHTML 1.1. As companies increasingly recognize opportunities for improving their relationship with international customers, the desire to customize communications in foreign languages is on the rise. Simultaneously translating ones messages into multiple languages introduces new complexities in ensuring proper message construction. "Many of our clients are already marketing extensively in Canada, seek to expand penetration in Europe and are seriously considering entering the Asian market," said Deirdre Baird. "To support these international efforts as well as our growing list of international-based clients, it was critical we provide tools that are equally adept across the full spectrum of character sets." Pivotal Veracity's tools enable clients to ensure proper message construction for all major languages/alphabets to include over 40 different encodings such as: us-ASCII (English), iso-8859-1 (Western Europe), iso8859-6 (Arabic), big5 (Chinese), shift_jis (Japanese), koi8-r (Russian), windows-1253 (Greek), etc. Bad message construction also impacts deliverability In addition to how the email looks in the recipient's viewer, incorrect message construction also directly impacts whether it "works" (e.g. tables scroll properly, links are clickable) and, equally, if not more importantly, whether your message will be delivered by the ISP. Extensive testing reveals that ISPs will block or redirect to the spam-folder improperly constructed emails. Recently, a large multi-brand retailer using Pivotal Veracity's delivery optimization suite discovered MSN and Hotmail were placing a critical Valentine's email in the bulk/spam folder. Comprehensive infrastructure, mailing methodology, and content analysis over a dozen different spam filters revealed no significant issues; nor were there any inadvertent anti-virus triggers. However, an examination of the email design and code revealed over 100 different problems that were not only jeopardizing the proper rendering of the message but were the reason their mail was being redirected to the bulk/spam folder by MSN and Hotmail. Their designer easily fixed the problems and the client's new MSN and Hotmail result: "100% inbox delivery!". Pivotal Veracity incorporates new tools into existing Delivery Optimization suite An average of 30% of legitimate permission-based emails is not reaching recipient's inboxes. Many companies still believe that their email copy is the primary reason their messages are being incorrectly filtered as spam when, in fact, their infrastructure and mailing methodologies are also analyzed via today's sophisticated network spam filters. "In addition to not fully understanding the scope of spam-filtering, we find many mailers don't recognize or have the tools to analyze the factors outside of spam-filtering that are impacting their deliverability", says Michelle Eichner, VP Client Services, Pivotal Veracity. "For example, anti-virus filtering is far more commonplace than spam-filtering and mailers often inadvertently include tags and other forms in their emails that may appear to be viruses. Our message optimization tools have included anti-virus analysis since January 2004. Message construction problems are similar. Mailers have no idea they have a problem and don't realize the far-reaching impact bad design can have on both rendering and delivery. Our goal is to place effective delivery optimization tools in the hands of our clients and, in today's environment, this means identifying and resolving all relevant issues impacting delivery. Message construction is another critical piece to this puzzle. It's fundamental really and that's why we have made the decision to incorporate this new tool set into our existing deliverability suite at no charge to clients. " About Pivotal Veracity Founded in 2003, Pivotal Veracity is an independent email delivery auditing and optimization company that works with permission-based companies and their vendors to improve the delivery of their marketing and service communications. Pivotal Veracity's customers are Fortune 1000 marketers as well as leading direct marketing service providers. A supporter of CAN-SPAM, Pivotal Veracity believes in responsible direct marketing and only works with companies who employ 100% double-opt-in list generation. For more information on Pivotal Veracity, please visit http://www.pivotalveracity.com. Contact
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