Recommended Reading - 09/28/2018

Our recommendations this week:

-1-

EMAILMKTGJOBS.BLOGSPOT.COM -- Recruiters, We Need to Talk

-2-

MEDIUM.COM -- The 10 Different Hats Email Marketers Wear

-3-

LITMUS.COM -- The Roi for Email Marketing: the Good News and the Bad News

-4-

RESOURCES.EMAILMONKS.COM -- Holiday Email Marketing Calendar & Strategies Infographic

-5-

MEETINGEVENTLEAD.GREENFIELD-SERVICES.CA -- Can I Email Attendees After A Conference? (Canada Edition)

Recommended Reading - 09/21/2018

Our recommendations this week:

-1-

CAMPAIGNMONITOR.COM -- 5 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Click-Through Rate

-2-

BLOG.HUBSPOT.COM -- The Ultimate Guide to Emotional Marketing

-3-

BLOG.DOTMAILER.COM -- Combatting Customer Shakedowns: How to Make Sure Offers Don't Dent Your Bottom Line

-4-

BLOGS.ORACLE.COM -- A Tale of Two Sweaters: Why Segmentation Alone Isn't Enough

-5-

SHERPABLOG.MARKETINGSHERPA.COM -- Ask Marketingsherpa: How to Get High-Paying Customers and Clients

Recommended Reading - 09/14/2018

Our recommendations this week:

-1-

BLOG.AWEBER.COM -- Newsletter Examples: How to Craft Irresistible Newsletter Content

-2-

SHOPIFY.COM -- The Beginner's Guide to Pinterest Advertising and Promoted Pins

-3-

BLOGS.ORACLE.COM -- 3 Tips to Reach More Millennials with Your Social Media Marketing

-4-

CONTENT.MYEMMA.COM -- 5 Subject Line Mistakes That Are Killing Your Open Rates

-5-

RESOURCES.EMAILMONKS.COM -- Ebook: the Role of Email Marketing in Lead Nurturing

Recommended Reading - 09/07/2018

Our recommendations this week:

-1-

SHOPIFY.COM -- Product Page Tune-Up: 9 Timeless Ways to Increase Conversions

-2-

INVISIONAPP.COM -- 3 Common—And Preventable—Prototyping Gotchas

-3-

EMAILMONKS.COM -- How to Design An Email Campaign That Meets Brand Guidelines

-4-

LITMUS.COM -- What Is An Esp?

-5-

CAMPAIGNMONITOR.COM -- 6 Ideas for Where to Start in Email Marketing

Why Do Email Developers Hate Outlook?

Every so often someone will ask "Why do Email Developers Hate Outlook?" and then follow-up with "But... Does anyone still use Outlook?"

To answer both questions, let's examine about what "Outlook" is.

Outlook.com is the web-based client that replaced/consolidated Microsoft's previous Hotmail.com, Live.com, Start.com and MSN.com mail offerings. There is also a web client for Outlook for Office 365, but it's pretty much the same as Outlook.com in how it functions and renders. Outlook.com has its roots in Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile Access, an impressive engineering feat with what it offered on the web long before anyone else.

And Outlook is a web app available on Android and iOS. They use the built-in rendering engines for those platforms, so typically any rendering oddities will also be seen in the stock Android and iOS Mail apps. (Gmail and Samsung have their own issues. Gmail alone could be a whole separate article.)

Outlook is a desktop client on the Mac. It uses the MacOS webkit rendering issue and emails look as beautiful as they do in the standard Apple Mail client. Outlook replaced Entourage and was available in Office 2011 and 2016.

And then there's Outlook on Windows. There's Outlook 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016. These use Microsoft Word as their rendering issue, not the various rendering issues (MSHTML, Trident, Spartan, EdgeHTML) that Microsoft has released with its various Windows versions over the years. The Word rendering engine doesn't support all of the modern CSS (or even HTML) commands, and then introduces a few of its own.

And, lastly, there's the oddballs - Outlook 2013 120-DPI which upscales fonts and images -- and an accessibility option in most versions of Windows to change all fonts displayed to make them larger than everything else on the platform.

There was also Outlook Express, a Windows app that shared the name but little else beyond also being an email client. Windows 10 also offers Windows Mail. And then Windows Mobile also has its own mail client. These are still distinct but are rarely used.

Which leads to the question "But does anyone still use Outlook? And if so, why??!!?"

Outlook is still well-used in the business world. The fact that Outlook on Windows shares its underpinnings with Word means that if you can see it in Word, you can see it in Outlook. This includes Excel spreadsheets and charts, PowerPoint slides and custom applications written by large organizations for their own use. (These are the places where it's nearly impossible to get a Mac and if you do you'll still have to use BootCamp or a company-issued PC to interact with some applications.)

Of course, changes to Word and Office over the years, plus these Word-specific inclusions and exclusions leads to lots of bugs when it comes to trying to create emails that look good in Outlook.

Some people just don't worry about Outlook if their audience is small enough it's rarely as small as they hope). But, more often than not a lot of cool experimental features (the kind of stuff that it's fun to build and wows subscribers) not to mention some great design is dropped in order to make sure the email will still look nice on Outlook.

This is why it's important for designers to collaborate with developers for new email designs. And if you're hiring an Email Developer and they bring up Outlook (and you can't work in this field and not have Outlook stories), now you know.  (And if you're hiring an Email Developer and they don't mention Outlook, you might want to keep looking.)

(cross-posted to LinkedIn)