There are times when sending your html email from Outlook is a perfect solution. For instance, your company credentials in a branded email that a sales team member can send directly to their prospect. It could make sense to send news to a small group of colleagues from Outlook. And it’s more personal.

Remember Outlook is not intended to send bulk email, and using an email sending platform such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Blazon to name a few will certainly help you and your organisation to be compliant with data protection laws.

Some points to be aware of:

Outlook does not enable the sending of mobile friendly email

Providing an experience of our email that is pleasant on small screens is more important than ever before. 23% of emails in South Africa are read on a mobile device (download Everlytic 2020 email benchmarks) while global averages show over 46% are read on a mobile device (see Hubspot email marketing stats). Outlook strips out the media queries embedded in the html code of the email that make it mobile friendly. So even if your email team designed a beautiful responsive email, that functionality is lost when you send the email from Outlook.

Outlook lacks bulk email support

All the benefits of using an email sending platform are missing from Outlook. You won’t know your open rate, click through rate, or other important marketing metrics. Outlook simply does not track this information. There is a workaround for tracking link clicks with Google Analytics – read how to track link clicks in Outlook.

Unsubscribe requests need to be handled manually.

If you’re sending out large volumes of email (thousands) there is a risk of blacklisting your company domain. Once an ISP blacklists your company’s domain no email can be sent by anyone in the company and business grinds to a halt.

Creating html email for Outlook

Here are some of Outlook’s html email shortcomings:

• Outlook tends to add padding to the layout of the email causing images and copy to shift in the recipient’s inbox.
• Gaps sometimes appear between sliced images.

• Another Outlook anomaly that can affect email layout is if the Outlook email sender’s display setting is set to 125% or 150%, the Outlook email “sender” would send correctly sized images, but the Outlook email recipient of a message sent from them would receive enlarged images.
• Fonts you choose to use in your email may not be installed on your recipient’s computer resulting in font swop which affects the look of your email.

Pop us a mail or give us a call for a refreshing conversation about helping your business send corporate communications from Outlook (and transitioning to the right email sending platform).