Outlook 2010, Webmail in browsers, iPhones… Any email marketers got a headache yet?

Whether you are responsible for deploying email marketing campaigns directly, designing for email, or both – you’ll have likely learned the hard way that ‘progress‘ in email technology and standards has been far from flowers and birdsong for email marketers.

Let’s face it Email marketers - You’ve had a tough ride of late

Between the adoption of mobile as a primary inbox, diversification of browsers as used to view webmail, and changes in mail-client technology (such Microsoft’s arguably ‘anti-email marketing’ use of word’s rendering engine since Outlook 07) – designing inbox-friendly emails can seem a little like aiming for a small moving target, after a heavy night out…whilst wearing mittens.  

The future looks challenging too. A new Hotmail version is due in the Summer, Windows mobile 7 will no doubt bring fresh challenges, and Outlook 2010 has merrily arrived at the party to burst marketers' email innovation balloons with the same limitations as Outlook 07. Boo. 

But some email marketing progress on YOUR side…

Thankfully, the movement of technology hasn’t been entirely weighted towards making your email marketing life more difficult. Now I’m sure there’s a ‘yoghurt + good bacteria’ analogy somewhere here, but I’ve been known to stray (a teeny bit) off track with my blogs to date, so I’ll try and stay on topic for a change with this one…

Last year we harnessed some of this good technology and introduced Inbox Preview to PureResponse.

Introducing Inbox Preview

With Inbox Preview, for a small fee per test, users can see how each email will appear in over twenty email clients, and in various states – such as with images on or off, or just viewed in the preview pane. So without installing and running dozens of mail-clients, designs could be optimised to look good across all the important inboxes.

It's just got better

1)    Outlook 2010 is now included in Inbox Preview results

2)    It'll now show major webmail clients as viewed in different browsers

3)    There's added iPhone previews to the results displayed (with more mobile clients to come soon!)

Oh, and it is now free, for good

Best of all we’ve removed the ‘per test’ fees for Inbox preview, permanently.

With every PureResponse package you can now test away to your hearts content

We figured email marketers could do with a break…

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