How Microsoft Could Cut Your Email Marketing Costs
June 24th, 2009 by Frank Piacitelli
If you do any email marketing, Microsoft is in a position to save you money or cost you money.
Most people think of email design and development as simpler than design and development for the web. In some ways it is; after all, an email is just one “page.” On the other hand, designers and developers like us have to make sure an email message looks consistent in all the popular places that people view email, and not only are there more email clients than web browsers, but they’re more segmented. Of course, one of the most popular email clients is Microsoft’s Outlook.
With the last version of Outlook, Microsoft changed its rendering engine, and basically took web designers’ options back to more than 5 years, forcing us to use old, tired, and downright poor techniques, and limiting what we could do designwise in an email. This caused an uproar in the design community and spawned the Email Standards Project, an organization that aims to standardize email rendering so that it’s easier for designers and developers, and thus if you’re a marketer or advertiser, less expensive for you.
The news is just out that Microsoft is planning to continue using their very poor rendering engine in Outlook 2010, the next version that is “in beta” (almost done but not released yet). Again, outrage has begun within the design community. I would like to invite marketers and advertisers to join us, to make enough noise so that Microsoft might just listen to its customers.
What can you do? Let your voice be heard with Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, visit http://fixoutlook.org/ and write a tweet about the project. As of this writing, 12,700 (and climbing quickly) individuals have already done so. There’s no question that Microsoft has the technology and manpower to fix this problem. They are choosing not to (I believe using a security issue as a scapegoat) and it’s costing you time, money, and creative freedom. Help us let them know that web and email standards are time- and money-savers for everyone.
- Frank Piacitelli
This entry was posted by Frank Piacitelli on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 and is filed under Ad business, Business, Design, Development, Email, Interactive, Interface Design, Marketing, Online Advertising, Rants and Raves, Technology, User Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
