MindComet

Outlook 2007 Can Now Render Background Images

For the past 3 years, designers and marketers alike have been trained to avoid implementing background images into their email’s designs. This was due to Outlook 2007’s inability to display such images. We all just kinda accepted Outlook’s faults and our collective emails designs were held back. But, alas, we will be deprived no more!

It has recently been discovered by a user of CampaignMonitor that background images can indeed display in Outlook 2007! But not without some hacking, of course.

First you have to add xmlns:v=“urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml” to your html tag.

Secondly, within your style tag, add the following selector:

v\:* {
  behavior: url(#default#VML);
  display:inline-block;

Then, within your table cell, you must add:

<td width="600" height="402" valign="top" bgcolor="#000000" background="images/yourimage.gif">
  <!—[if gte mso 9]>
  <v:image id="image" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:1;' src="images/yourimage.gif"/>
  <v:shape id="text" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:2;'>
  <![endif]—>
  <p align="center" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#ffffff; font-size:18px;">This is the text in front of the background image.</p>

<!—[if gte mso 9]>
  </v:shape>
  <![endif]—>

Believe it or not, the combination of the steps above allows for background images to render in Outlook 2007. Try it out yourself. I'll be testing this all day today, if I come up with any issues, I'll be sure to update this post. If you find anything, please share them and comment below or on the original thread at Campaign Monitor.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 15, 2010

Is AskMen.com Coming On Too Strong?

As an email marketer, I am all about getting as much subscriber information as possible. Knowing who they are and knowing what is relevant to them is invaluable. Having this information makes for an ideal relationship for both the marketer and the subscriber.

But how exactly are you supposed to go about getting this information? Do you ask for as much personal and lifestyle information as possible up front? Or do you take a more lengthy approach, collecting data through responses and activity over time?

AskMen.com believes in the former.

When signing up for their newsletter, you’re given a series of options that are presented in a 4-step process.

The first step being the “List City Guides” step. Mainly, there is a pre-selected opt-in to their newsletter , the “A. List”, which covers everything “guys need to know” about. They also set expectations informing users that it arrives every Wednesday. Nicely done.

In addition to opting in to receive their general newsletter, it provides the opportunity to sign up for newsletters based on a major US, Canadian, UK or Australian city. I’m assuming this comes in handy whenever AskMen is sponsoring an event in that particular city or when a they have a lot of editorial or user-submitted content for a specific area.

The second page consists of more general demographic info—name, sex, zip, etc. The usual suspects. It also provides an option to receive BlackBerry text versions of the newsletter. Smart move, as I’d imagine a large portion of AskMen.com’s potential subscribers probably use BlackBerrys.

The third page consists of an arbitrary refer-a-friend step, which is where AskMen.com loses focus. There is no incentive for the new subscriber to invite their friends to a newsletter that they have not yet received. It comes off as being a little greedy, but I give them an A for effort.

Finally is a sports-centric page with the opportunity to sign up for newsletters on all of the major american sports.

Once this process is complete, they know what city you live in (or near), general demographic info, if you’re using a BlackBerry, who your 5 closest friends are and what your favorite sports are… and they know all of this off the bat.

So is this method of data collection overkill? Does it turn potential subscribers off from signing up? Or is it best to collect this information upon sign up and get it out of the way?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 14, 2010

The EEC Spearhead Metric Standardization

Since the inception of email marketing, professionals have struggled to come together and agree upon a means of determining metrics. Believe it or not, there have yet to be any standards put in place.

The landscape of determining email metrics have largely consisted of rogue marketers and independent states, determining their own specific way of measuring the results for their emails.

But this is all about to change. The EEC (Email Experience Council) is stepping up and facing this problem head on by proposing industry-wide standards for metrics. The EEC has created a group of leaders in the email marketing industry, dubbed the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable. The group is focusing on ESPs (Email Service Providers) to join the movement, as they are the ones who will be implementing the reporting standards in the future.

For more information on the S.A.M.E. (Support Adoption of Metrics for Email) project, visit the EEC’s site. Once there, you should review the particularly interesting Project Guide PDF. Pay close attention to the ESP Reporting Matrix in that document… Out of 10 ESPs, each determined Delivery, Opens and Clicks differently—no wonder there’s such a huge need for standardization.

I can predict that if this gets momentum on the ESP side of things, there are going to be huge changes in email marketing. New terms and definitions popping up, completely transforming the ideas of success and failure. Hopefully for the whole, the growing pains won’t take too long to leapfrog.

MindComet will be in full support of this initiative, adopting the new standards by December 2010.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 07, 2010

Arial Unicode MS: Your Safest Bet For Consistent Foreign Language Display

If you’ve ever had to manage and develop international email campaigns, you may know how frustrating getting the text to display consistently across all major email clients is. With multiple languages and their vast character sets, it’s difficult to find one font that can support so many foreign characters.

Recently, we have been developing email templates specifically for Chinese users. During testing, everything was going smooth until we began testing for Outlook ‘07 (no surprise there).

From troubleshooting and tweaking the code, we determined that if you’re going to code an email for Chinese users, make sure the text renders using the Arial Unicode MS font.

This is the most forgiving and widely-accepted font, especially for Chinese characters. It contains all of the characters, ideographs and symbols defined in the Unicode 2.1 standard. It is distributed with Microsoft Office, it is automatically installed with Vista and XP and is also bundled with OS X 10.5 and later. Unfortunately, it does not ship with Windows 7. You can find more on this on Microsoft’s Unicode Support Page.

Microsoft owns AUMS, which is no surprise why anything other than the sans-serif font would work in Outlook ‘07. Oh, and Outlook ‘07 is stupid and doesn’t know how to search for similar fonts unlike every other email client on the market. Just sayin’.

So if you’re sending out emails that are encoded for UTF-8 which use fonts other than AUMS, the likelihood that all of the characters will display is slim.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 01, 2010