Have you experienced your newsletter looking a bit funky when you are viewing it in either Outlook 2007 or 2010? This is because Microsoft’s attempt at “innovating” simply replaced the traditional rendering engine with the Microsoft Word rendering engine. This causes unnecessary “breaks” in your newsletter if it is image-heavy and may also chop the top of your images off. That being said, let’s take a couple steps backwards and refresh our memory on the do’s and don’ts of email marketing.
As I’m sure you are aware (and if not, you are now), it is best practice to use the least amount of images as possible while still producing an aesthetically pleasing newsletter. You may be thinking, ‘But images look so pretty, why wouldn’t I want to use as many as possible?’
Reasons for limiting the amount of images:
- Many email clients have images turned off by default, requiring recipients to click ‘display images.’
- Some email clients have images turned off permanently.
- Some corporate email clients have images turned off permanently.
- Images of “text” will not benefit your SEO goals (If you don’t already know, text that you type out in your newsletter can be “crawled” by the search engines and help drive traffic to your site)
- 5. Microsoft’s Word rendering engine causing page breaks in images and is known to chop off the top of images.
That said, if you still want to use images for the majority of your newsletter, the height of your image must not be greater that 1728 pixels. If, for example, your image is 250 pixels longer than 1728px, 250 px will get chopped off the top. A work around is to create multiple 1 row, 1 column tables (one on top of the other) and slice your image up into smaller pieces.
Please contact the FireDrum support team at support@app.firedrumemailmarketing.com with any questions regarding your newsletter being displayed differently in Outlook 2007 and 2010.
