Emails in Outlook are awful

Contacts Email
1

Hello,

Does anyone know why the email documents look lovely in WineDirect and okay on a mobile/tablet but turn into a complete dog’s breakfast in Outlook? Is there any way to fix it?

I can cope with fonts reverting to Times New Roman but not a changing layout and cut-off letters.

Please help!

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Hi there,

Why this happens is because emails render based on the email client they’re viewed in - that’s why emails in Outlook look different than emails in Mac Mail or emails on yahoo. This isn’t a WineDirect thing, its an email thing. WGM run the emails we make for our clients through a validator that tests different clients. To know why this is happening on your specific e mail, I’d have to see the code. We’d be happy to look at your emails and see if we could help if you’d like.

WineGlass Marketing
Clear Direct Strategies

Susan DeMatei
susan@wineglassmarketing.com
4446 Finch Court | Napa, CA 94558
707-225-7178
@sdematei


www.wineglassmarketing.com

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Hey @wine,

To add to what Susan said, Outlook in general is very picky when it comes to emails. Unfortunately, there is a lot of css and code formatting that it doesn’t support so it will just ignore it in the email completely.

If you are a little bit comfortable with HTML (or can find someone who is), one thing to try is copying the source code from the email, pasting it here (https://inliner.cm/), clicking ‘Make It Inline’, and pasting it back into WineDirect. (Inlining moves the placement of the CSS styles already present in your email directly into the HTML code.) This will help the picky email clients read it better. Any CSS that isn’t supported by Outlook won’t be fixed, but it should definitely help.

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@wine

Yeah, it’s an outlook thing. I had the same problems when using mailchimp, etc.

Just adding that Yahoo is also painful this way, and I’m formatting some of my emails differently simply because yahoo won’t display my images the way I want in certain formats.

This is the reason why I always send test emails to multiple accounts, to make sure I’m catching any format display issues.

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Thanks everyone for the confirmation that it’s not just me! I’ll try @Andrea’s inliner technique for the next email, this one went out with some extra tweaking.

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You can do this for your text classes.

   <!--[if mso]>
   <style type="text/css">
   .text {
   font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
   }
   </style>
   <![endif]-->

Here’s my manifesto on Outlook.

  1. Outlook is an awful email client and if your company forces you to use it, you should protest.

  2. As mentioned, each email client renders HTML/CSS differently. Some support media queries, some support web fonts, but it’s not standardized as much as modern web browsers are. Outlook historically has used Microsoft Word’s HTML rendering engine which is full of archaic problems and bugs and is largely responsible for why creating emails has become such a hack-fest.

  3. Luckily, Outlook usage is in rapid decline, with only a 7% general market share at this point: https://emailclientmarketshare.com. If you use a third-party ESP, you should check your stats to see what your customers use and design for that. Generally speaking, Outlook is still a big deal (but dying) in enterprise, as I’m sure a lot of you are forced to use it at work. Since we primarily market to consumers and not businesses, we find that our Outlook usage is much, much lower as people typically use personal email accounts and read on their phones and web-based clients.

  4. Some ESP’s have email rendering tests for the major clients. If yours doesn’t, you can use a service like Litmus or Email on Acid to test them across several clients before testing. You don’t need to hire a wine marketing firm to do this.

  5. With that said, the prevailing recommendation in email marketing is that it doesn’t have to look perfect on all clients. Focus on what most of your customers use (iOS Mail and Gmail, honestly) and assure that’s a good experience. The people still using Outlook will be accustomed to compromise anyways.

  6. Shots fired here, but @winedirect, you are not entirely innocent in this process. Your WYSIWYG editors, even in code mode, have been documented to change code and images in ways inconsistent with convention. Don’t act like the platform isn’t party complicit here.

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Hi @EdFarmCollective,

Thanks so much for sharing your manifesto! It gave me some confidence to let the outlook issues go :slight_smile: