Fixing Common Outlook Errors for Newsletter Campaigns

If you have a newsletter campaign chances are you have Outlook errors on your client end. In this post we will take an in-look into Outlook and some of the problems you may have encountered. A lot of this post comes back to the clients security settings and css incompatibilities which can be worked around This post is about fixing and preventing some of those errors, and also some ways to increase website traffic using newsletter marketing.

Error 1: You have sent out an html email to a non-html recipient. As a result Outlook has marked up the content in raw text and destroyed your layout.

Solution: Always write two versions of your emails – one in text and one with html. You can try and send them multi-part but don’t rely on this alone as some email browsers don’t handle it well. The best thing to do is capture whether or not your client wants to receive html formatted email or not and creating two separate lists.

Error 2: images are used for layout, so that the layout of the email is destroyed when images are automatically blocked.

Solution: like html, the solution is to always set heights of your images, and also to contain them in a div/table with a set height. This will prevent them from collapsing.

Error 3: your email renders fine in the browser but looks terrible when sent out.

Solution: this is a broad problem with a simple solution. Set-up two email accounts, then send the newsletter to the other account with maximum security enabled. This will allow you to see all of the errors that are likely to occur and try to correct them. It would also be a good idea to test your email in hotmail, gmail and other major web based email clients.

Error 4: you’ve sent out a newsletter or single email and you don’t know if it is actually being opened or which links are being clicked.

Solution: one of the easiest ways to check how often emails are being opened is to include a token in the email (for example a single pixel image) and monitor how often it is being downloaded. If you don’t want to do this yourself, there are hosted solutions like http://www.didtheyreadit.com/index.php/html/howitworks which will do this for you. To track whether or not hyperlinks are being followed use a URL variable like http://www.example.com/?ref=email1 that is specific to the email, and then track the page views using your website analytics. Also, remember to use absolute URLs when you send out your newsletters, otherwise users will be searching for an address relative to the root of the document. For SEO purposes, disallow this file in your robots.txt file to prevent a duplicate content penalty in search engines. Also, to increase traffic to your site it is better to have only snippets of a story in the newsletter and then have links to the rest of the story on your site.

Error 5: email continually bounces for an address

Solution: there may be many reasons for this. First of all, make sure you have a “verify email” field when you are capturing your subscriber details. You should also have a “captcha” or similar mechanism to prevent spam bots from automatically subscribing in denial of service attacks. If they are a real subscriber and have entered their details correctly it may mean that their inbox is full. In this case there is not a lot you can do.

Do you know any other Outlook work-arounds?