Introduction

You may have noticed that emails sent from Neon CRM sometimes appear differently in Outlook when compared to other email clients*. Like the pages you visit on the web, emails use HTML and CSS for displaying rich content with images, complex layouts, custom fonts, and more. However, not all email clients render emails in the same way. While most email clients have converged on common standards for rendering rich emails, Outlook has notably avoided adopting many modern HTML and CSS standards, which can cause emails to appear differently when viewed in certain versions of Outlook.

This article describes some of the common visual discrepancies you will notice in emails sent from Neon CRM when viewed in Outlook.

While it will not be possible to fix all display issues in Outlook, we recommend learning about the behaviors of Outlook below in order to ensure the content you create is still viewable when opened in Outlook. If possible, we recommend obtaining a copy of Outlook and using Neon CRM’s Send a test email feature for email campaigns to preview your emails in Outlook.

*Note: When referring to “Outlook”, this article is referring to the Outlook desktop email client. An email client is an application—such as Outlook, Apple Mail, or Mozilla Thunderbird—used for downloading, viewing, and managing emails. This article does not pertain to the Outlook.com email service. Recipients with an Outlook.com email address may not encounter the visual discrepancies described in this article if they use a web browser or another email client for viewing their emails.

Visual discrepancies of emails in Outlook

The section below describes some of the common visual discrepancies you will notice in emails sent from Neon CRM when viewed in Outlook.

Images do not align as expected

You can use the alignment tool to align images in your emails. Due to how Outlook handles images alignment styling, images may not appear aligned in some versions of Outlook

In Gmail:

In Outlook:

When possible, we recommend using full-width images (around 600 pixels wide in a single column row) to avoid the need for image alignment in your emails.

Text does not wrap around images

When an image is inserted within a text block, you will see that the text is automatically wrapped around the image when previewing the email in your browser. Most email clients will preserve this text wrapping, but in Outlook, text will not wrap and will appear below the inserted image.

In Gmail:

In Outlook:

Stacked images have a space between them

Outlook automatically adds margins around all images inserted into an email. When stacking or aligning images side-by-side in your emails, this can cause an extra white space to appear between the images.

Rounded buttons do not appear rounded

Neon CRM’s spring 2021 release of its new Email Campaign builder introduced the ability to add buttons to your emails.

This feature includes the ability to style buttons with rounded corners. In some versions of Outlook, these buttons will appear with square corners.

Cell spacing in tables is collapsed

If you insert a table into your email and set a value for Cell spacing in the table properties menu, the cell spacing may appear collapsed in Outlook.