Content Related

Today I came across this video on youtube by International Business Speaker Tom Murrell. Within the video he outlines the 5 most crucial things to remember when integrating email into your marketing plan.

If you are not already doing all of these 5 p’s you really should reevaluate your email marketing and ensure that you make your emails personal. I strongly agree that the more personal you make your email campaigns, the more sucessful they will be. Use the customers name, use dynamic content based on what you know about your subscriber already. Move away from an email ‘blast’ and move towards a 1-1 customer relationship. Email is a very effective method to include in your marketing mix to achieve this.

Designing your templates for Outlook is important, especially if you are doing B2B mailings as Outlook is the most common email client used (over 50% of business users) in the workplace and an increasing amount of organisations are switching from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007.

The biggest change between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 is that 2007 no longer uses Internet Explorer is its rendering engine, instead it uses Microsoft Word to render emails which it receives.

The problem with this is that Word is much less flexible, has less support for commonly used html code and CSS style sheets.

For a full list of things that Outlook no longer supports please see the Microsoft article on Outlook 2007 which was published.

The highlights are:

• No support for animated GIFs (moving image files) – Despite Microsofts quote here saying that “GIF is a widely supported Internet standard.”
• Macromedia Flash
• background images
• Forms
• alt tags in images

This has not been popular amongst the Email Marketing community of designers.

However as Outlook 2007 has such a big market share it is not practical for Email Marketers to do nothing. Unfortunately therefore, marketers need to review their campaigns and email templates to ensure they still display reasonably well within Outlook 2007.

Here are some ideas and tips from Email Manual on how you might choose to address these changes.

• Send a copy of your email templates and campaigns to a copy of Outlook 2007 to test them before you send your live campaigns.
• Use a service such as litmus to test your templates in all common browsers/email clients.
• Ask your ESP to review your templates, make suggestions for increased compatibility with email clients including Outlook 2007.
• Ask your ESP to review and fix your templates for Outlook 2007 (This is likely to be chargeable, check pricing with them.)
• Use this as an oportunity to review your emails against your marketing objectives, have they become to complex, cluttered? Perhaps this is just what you needed to take your emails back to basics and realign your templates with your marketing objectives, perhaps even a complete redesign?