Tactical tips, suggestions and best practices to consider

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Our experts provided these tips and suggestions, lumped into three categories: education and understanding; testing; and adjustments or new best practices:

Education & Understanding

• Read the MS documentation on Outlook 2007 so you and your designers understand the limitations and can account for these if you want to design Outlook 2007-friendly emails (Email Marketing Report's Brownlow)
• Outlook 2007 has been available as a no-charge beta for months, enabling many marketers to test and optimize their email in advance of the recent launch. (Microsoft's Spiezle)

Test, test and re-test

• Test, test and re-test campaigns to optimize deliverability. Tools and deliverability resources are available for mailers at www.microsoft.com/postmaster as well as from http://postmaster.live.com/ (Spiezle)
• Review your subscriber list to get a feel for the webmail services and likely clients being used by them. Test these services and clients against your design and adjust accordingly. (Brownlow)
• Ensure your email service provider has tested any plug-n-play templates that the company offers (GOT's Vezina)
• Test the rendering of your campaigns in all email clients PRIOR to mailing. Use a tool provided by your email service provider, agency or deliverability partner, or just set up test accounts and check manually. (Return Path's Miller)

Adjustments & New Best Practices

• If you're a beginner or intermediate at web design, simply avoid: CSS (cascading style sheets), background images, animated GIFs and <div> tags. (Vezina)
• Add a link to the web version of your email, so if things look grim there's an alternative for your recipients to view. (Brownlow)
• Realize that Outlook 2007 is one of many display environments that can wreak havoc with inappropriately designed email. Designing email just for Outlook 2007 is like designing a road for bicycles only. (Brownlow)
• In Q2, start to roll back to simple HTML and try to inform your design as much as possible with real subscriber input. (Miller)
• Offer a quick poll asking when your subscribers intend to upgrade (if at all). Talk to your subscribers through online surveys and/or focus groups. Are some of the advanced features you feel you can't live without really that important to them? Will simple links do just as well as interactive elements or search fields? (Miller)
• Sadly, there is no "sniffer" that will tell your MIME formatted messages that the client is Outlook 2007. However, you can add mouse type to your header instructions to easily view the message as a web page or to change preferences to text only. This will at least address any rendering difficulties until Outlook 2007 has a broader share of market. (Miller)
• Track subscriber behavior, particularly for B2B subscribers. Are formerly active subscribers suddenly going non-responsive? Maybe they can't see your email! Are there certain receivers/ISPs where you see a drop off in open and click rates? Perhaps the Outlook 2007 adoption is higher to this segment. This data may give you a clue as to adoption of your own file. Invite those subscribers to re-subscribe to the text version. (Miller)
• Give more attention to the words you use. The tougher the limitations on design, the bigger the role your text plays in driving action. A picture is worth approximately zero words if it isn't displayed properly. Don't let clever design get in the way of the message. (Brownlow)
• Hope for the best: Using Word as Outlook's rendering engine appears to be some sort of horrible mistake. We can only hope that Microsoft, which is already reportedly at work on Service Pack 1, puts Internet Explorer back in charge of rendering soon so email marketers can avoid some HTML overhauls down the line. (EEC's White)

This will continue to be a hot topic among the online marketing and design community. Considering many email marketers struggle to implement any changes to their campaigns due to intense production schedules and lack of resources, it will be interesting to see if Outlook 2007 receives the sense of urgency that it deserves given the impact it can have on a customer relationship, especially in the B2B world.

We will revisit this topic later this year to see how these predictions fared, what changed and if Outlook 2007 really was a boon to consumers and headache to email marketers. Feel free to share your experiences and thoughts.

G. Simms Jenkins is founder and principal of BrightWave Marketing, an Atlanta-based email marketing and customer relationship services firm. Read full bio.