Outlook 2007 Changes
As briefly discussed in February's issue of EzeNews, the release of Outlook 2007 isn't as disastrous as first thought. Whilst Outlook has the major market share of Email Clients (approx. 60-70%), the uptake of Outlook 2007 todate, has been quite slow. Whilst the release of Outlook 2007 in many ways appears to have taken Email Marketing back to the dark ages of the 1990's, the limitations imposed are certainly not insurmountable. In a nutshell we have added below, the design areas where we feel email marketers will be most affected when designing their creatives. For a full list of Outlook 2007's capabilities and changes please see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
Additionally, we have updated our Design Tips article which addresses the below changes.
No animated Gifs or Flash.
At best, Flash was never fully accepted within all email clients, so this is not a huge change, however, animated gifs will be sadly missed. If you are still wanting to use an animated gif, be sure to design it with the final image as the first frame. That is, Outlook 2007 will show the animated gif as a static gif of the first frame.
No Forms
Yes, that's right…go to your templates now and change your email form over to a weblink to your webform. Whilst there are a few Email Clients which currently don't permit forms to work, they display OK, however, Outlook 2007 actually replaces the form fields with [brackets] as well as having the form submissions blocked.
No background images
This is going to hit many designers hard. You can still use background colours within cells, but not within entire tables, and so we suggest that if you're wanting to add the nice gradient background image, then add a background colour of a similar shade to support it for the Outlook 2007 recipients.
Plain CSS
Outlook 2007 offers limited support for CSS, therefore the structure of the email needs to be created using tables rather than CSS. Inline CSS within the body still works the best and has the widest support amongst Email Clients, but I've also heard reports that CSS within the <head> still works (although it doesn't work in webmail client such as Hotmail and Gmail) and externally referenced style sheets still work with Outlook 2007, however, with limitations (i.e the formatting can change). What does not work is attributes such as position:absolute, float or relative. Additionally, list-style tags don't work, so you'll have to settle for the old-fashioned, plain old bullet points.
No JavaScript
This shouldn't really have much of an impact as JavaScript was never fully accepted by many Email Clients.
Kath Pay is Marketing Director of Ezemail, an innovative company that provides comprehensive email marketing solutions. For more information on how easily email marketing can be implemented, please contact Kath at kath@ezemail.com.
©Kath Pay 2007
