It’s 2019, and Outlook is still rendered with Word.

One of the largest pain points for every digital marketer is email. Young companies can start with some simple drag and drop templates, but as your company grows, your email strategy and approach must adapt and grow with it.

I recently finished transitioning our company to an HTML based email from an image based one. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with the image approach, but we were looking for greater dynamic flexibility in how the content was presented. It also yielded the benefit that copy changes no longer required going into photoshop, and slices became an instant thing of the past.

One of the largest hurdles to this transition has been Outlook.

Make no mistake about it, when it comes to how it actually renders email, Outlook is in no way Enterprise.

For those who are blissfully unaware, Outlook requires an entire code base dedicated to just displaying on Outlook clients. And even with best practices applied, rendering can look different across multiple versions of Outlook. I recently encountered an issue where Outlook unexplicably displayed black bars on each side of a div. All of the custom Outlook HTML looks fine, and we use this same template for every email we send. This one displayed differently — every Outlook client on Windows machines display the content…