Taking On Microsoft To Change Email Marketing:
Written on the 25 of June, 2009, by Bree Davies
If there are three words I can say to our developers which will guarantee a normally laid back group of guys turn into anger fuelled, frustrated human beings it’s these: Internet Explorer and Outlook.
I’ve already mentioned that the presence of Internet Explorer makes our jobs infinitely more difficult than they need to be, for all the exception rules which need to be written and additional hours of testing which need to be done to make sure our sites cater for the beast of a browser (which is still the most widely used by internet users).
But the point of this blog is basically to rant about Microsoft Outlook specifically. Yesterday, we discovered via a protest led by Campaign Monitor and the Email Standards Project that Microsoft will be continuing to use the Word rendering engine to display HTML email campaigns in Outlook 2010.
This is a problem because Outlook does not adhere to the international standard for email clients — so we have to use a development style that is practically archaic and create very simple designs so email campaigns don’t arrive as a jumbled mess for Outlook users (which is a pretty significant percentage of users out there).
In the face of the prospect of dealing with the many associated issues Outlook brings to email marketing and web design for potentially another five years (at least) Campaign Monitor and the Email Standards Project decided they’ve finally had a gutful. So they kicked off the protest fixoutlook.org using Twitter. When I first received the email yesterday, there were 200 followers. Now, there are about 20,000 – and increasing. Pretty impressive.
However, despite the overwhelming support from the digital community for the initiative, Microsoft are not going to change their ways. While they couldn’t ignore the thousands of responses to the issue in such a short amount of time – Outlook 2010 will not change.
William Kennedy, VP of Microsoft Office’s Communication and Forms Team, confirmed this via the Microsoft website yesterday, defending Outlook’s email authoring capabilities and the fact you can create HTML-like messages without the use of a third party system. This is all well and good if everyone in the world used Outlook. But they don’t. Therefore, for the rest of the non-Outlook using world, designers and developers are forced to conform to a separate set of rules to fit in with the Outlook way of displaying emails.
But the battle is not over. Check out Fix Outlook’s response to William Kennedy, and the huge amounts of press the campaign has been receiving on the Email Standards Project website. You can also find out more by visiting the Fix Outlook site, or follow @fixoutlook on Twitter.
Rant over.
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Bree Davies
Digital Project Manager
As R&B’s Digital Project Manager, Bree Davies brings experience working for some of Australia’s most high profile organisations including Morrison Media, Endemol Southern Star and the Virgin Blue Group.
