Outlook problems on your email campaign

Microsoft Outlook’s 2007, 2010, and 2013 versions use Microsoft Word to display their email’s HTML. This causes email formats to look very different to other email clients such as Gmail. Because Microsoft Word is designed for print design and not for HTML, you may have problems with viewing your campaign.

If you are a designer or developer and you are creating the design of your email marketing campaign from our HTML Editor, you may be facing some of these problems when testing your campaigns in Microsoft Outlook.

Here are some of Outlook’s inconveniences

• Images do not show automatically

In the first and most current versions Outlook, the images are blocked automatically which is the reason for the security message at the beginning of your message. One option to combat image blocking in Outlook, is to add ALT text to the images.

The ALT text is the text that will show the email client instead of the image, thus giving some context to the person who subscribed to this content.. In these versions, Outlook will be able to show the images for trusted senders. If your subscribers add their email address to the address book, the images will be displayed automatically.

• Image looks cropped or distorted

When a very large image is inserted, it will be cropped by Outlook. The limit for the image length should be approximately 1728px for image height. Outlook will manipulate the image, trimming the pixels from the top or bottom of the image. Decrease this by avoiding messages that only contain one image and reducing the size of it before uploading it to the application.

• GIF is not displayed

GIFs are not played by Outlook. Instead of showing the animation, Outlook will only show the first frame of the GIF. So you must ensure that the most important information is in this first frame.

• Square shaped buttons are showing

The Border-radius property, which is one of the most used CSS properties, is not supported in Outlook versions. Without an alternative solution, subscribers who open their emails from Outlook will continue to see the square shaped buttons.

• Additional blank spaces

Because HTML rendering of Outlook is done using Microsoft Word, it is possible that some blank spaces are placed over an image. Because Outlook recognizes mail in a manner similar to the preview of an email before it is printed, Outlook will populate the space it recognizes as two separate pages with an additional blank space.

These problems pertaining to displaying HTML in Outlook or other email clients, is something out Mailpro’s control. For this reason, we recommend that you try to recognize which version of Outlook your subscribers use and take this into account when designing and doing the necessary tests.

If you have any doubts about any of Mailpro’s functionalities, our support team is ready to help you. Contact Us