I know this is late. But, I just recently switched to Outlook 2007 and noticed first hand about the incompatibility in rendering some of the existing email newsletter…

Words have been spreading since early this year — with disappointments from email marketers — that the new Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses Word HTML rendering engine instead of IE-based HTML rendering engine. The latter was used in previous version of Outlook.

Bronto blog has a scoop on how to handle this issue. There are certainly ways to overcome this. Don’t hold your breath, it may involve reworking on your HTML email template.

Visit Bronto blog for a quick overview of what are different in Outlook 2007 and previous versions.

Microsoft also provides resources for web designer. A validator is also available for download. It will help you validate HTML for your design and its compatibility with Outlook 2007 engine.

Mark Brownlow has a summary of the issue.

Since switching to Microsoft Office 2007 two weeks ago, off all email newsletters I subscribed to, I have seen none of them which are unreadable. If you only use simple HTML, you should be okay.

Some marketers think that to avoid being delivered into the junk or spam folder, they have to avoid certain words that can cause alerts in spam filters. And that’s it.

Nothing is further from the truth nowadays.

Other factors, such as authentication, reputation and message construction are more critical if messages are to land in inboxes, writes Stefan Pollard in a new article at ClickZ.

Spam filters such as SpamAssassin, an open-source spam-filter program, has an extensive list of triggers that set off the filter. But, that’s not all. There are hundreds of tests on a message, that will assign a point value based on the likelihood of the elements to be used in spam messages.

Only after the message accumulates too many points that the system flags it as spam.

More issues are also likely to trigger filters and collect higher point values than those assigned to words in the message body. They include:

• Incorrectly formatted or incomplete e-mail headers, which list technical details of the message transfer, including the sender’s IP and e-mail sending address
• Broken tags and sloppy HTML coding
• Too large an image relative to the amount of text
• Scripting that could launch viruses or spyware
• Attachments
• URLs or domains that have appeared in spam

Although marketers have to select their words carefully, using the word “free” in the subject line is something they can do as long as they provide the right kind of offer in the message.

Nowadays, recipients have all the rights to click on the spam button to flag a message as such. If your message looks like spam and recipients can’t tell the message is from you, even the most careful choice of words can’t help.

Email marketers should begin attending to Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authentication to improve email deliverability.

A new study showed that SPF checks are becoming part of content filtering tests done by Internet service providers. These checks involve comparing the sender’s return path domain and the IP address to a list of approved IPs the sender includes in their DNS zone.

The Lyris’ EmailAdvisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for Q2 2007 measured the delivery path of more than 436,000 permission-based e-mail marketing messages using ISP domains in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.

Changes in IP addresses or email service providers without updating SPF records could possibly increase the chance of failure when passing content filters. Marketers need to ensure that their SPF records are current to maintain deliverability.

The results from Constant Contact’s Travel & Tourism Outlook survey shows that email marketing is still the most favorite tool to address challenges in different industries, especially in travel and tourism.

The first challenge businesses face in the industry is to find new customers (42 percent), while generating business in the off-season come next at 27 percent.

When it comes to the method the respondents use to overcome these challenges, 47 percent of the respondents agreed upon email marketing, followed by 17 percent answered direct mail, 13 percent for search engine ad, 10 percent for newspaper ad, and 2 percent each for yellow page ad and radio ad.

Businesses in the industry have been using email marketing to reduce dependency on print (44 percent), generate repeat visits from past customers (33 percent), get higher volume of visitors (27 percent), increase reservation (18 percent), filling reservations during off-season (11 percent) and increase ticket sales (8 percent).

If you are curious about different types of communications the business send, here are the top 3 results: Newsletter - 83 percent, promotions - 67 percents and even invitations and calendars - 56 percent.

For full results and link to the survey results in PDF format, visit Business Wire.

Christopher Knights offers tips to produce your own editorial calendar. It is simply a planning tool to help guide the consistency of your email newsletter issues.

There a couple of payoff to producing editorial calendar:

1. Your ezine will be produced on a timelier manner. Avoid premature quality content which is developed very close to deadline.
2. Have a more natural flow between each issue.
3. Notify audience about future issue.
4. Improving guest contributions for those who know about the topic.

Of course, the last point could happen if you make your editorial calendar public.

MailChimp has a simpler approach to editorial calendar.