Outlook 2007 Design Guide

The nature of Email Marketing opens the door for companies to communicate with a wide range of customers in different time zones and geographies in a timely manner. This wonderful channel also brings unique challenges that require us to ensure our customers receive and perceive our brand in the manner in which we intend it to be conveyed.

Recognizing the importance of the email reader is critical

In most other mediums, we can carefully design our communication and distribute it - whether by direct mail, television or radio - confident that what we designed will be received by our customers intact. Whether someone watches your television commercial sitting in an airport or on their couch, for example, does not alter the commercial. This, however, is not the case with email. Whether due to a lack of knowledge, tools, or simply time, many continue to develop email communications with the false assumption that what they see in their design software or the test message they see in their inbox is actually representative of what their recipients will see.

With email, both the message you design and what the customer uses to read that message have a direct impact on what you ultimately communicate. This is because different email readers (e.g. Outlook 2003, Hotmail, Express 6, Lotus Notes 7, Yahoo) render email messages differently. What works in one reader, does not always work in another. What displays in one, may not display in another and almost certainly won’t display identically. The end result is that an email that works and looks perfectly fine in your inbox may be garbled, dysfunctional and unrecognizable in your customers’ inboxes.

Want to read the full study? Download it here   Pivotal Veracity Outlook 2007 Design & Rendering Guide