Ideas - Click Marketing Automation for D365

Please update ClickDimensions to support identifying a href attribute in a VML <v> tag and successfully substituting the tracking link so we can capture Click events from emails viewed in Outlook.

 

At the time of this writing the ClickDimensions product is unable to recognise a href attribute inside the <v> tag of VML code.

 

To our knowledge VML code is the only way to render lozenge/pill type buttons and round rectangle buttons in Outlook clients. Because they are coded buttons rather than images, email clients will not block them and leave ugly broken assets across an email.

 

It goes without saying how ubiquitous the Outlook client is in the B2B space, so this is causing us pain having to roll back to images and Border code to preserve Click event capture.

 

The issue occurs when applying the "Bulletproof Button" methodology recommended by Litmus (https://litmus.com/blog/a-guide-to-bulletproof-buttons-in-email-design). The standard implementation uses a conditional that checks if the email client is Outlook [if mso] and runs VML. What happens is that the target href is split in two different parts - the <v> tag for the VML/Outlook render and the traditional <a> tag for all other email clients.

 

I can provide an example of the code below from a free online tool (https://buttons.cm/). Note how the href exists in two places.:

 

************************************************************************************************************

 

<div><!--[if mso]>

        <v:roundrect xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" href="https://landingpage.yourwebsite.com" style="height:40px;v-text-anchor:middle;width:200px;" arcsize="10%" strokecolor="#1e3650" fill="t">

    <v:fill type="tile" src="https://i.imgur.com/0xPEf.gif" color="#556270" />

    <w:anchorlock/>

    <center style="color:#ffffff;font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-weight:bold;">Show me the button!</center>

  </v:roundrect>

<![endif]--><a href="https://landingpage.yourwebsite.com"

style="background-color:#556270;background-image:url(https://i.imgur.com/0xPEf.gif);border:1px solid #1e3650;border-radius:4px;color:#ffffff;display:inline-block;font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-weight:bold;line-height:40px;text-align:center;text-decoration:none;width:200px;-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;mso-hide:all;">Show me the button!</a></div>

 

************************************************************************************************************

 

In practice when an email using the VML button code is sent by ClickDimensions and opened in an Outlook client, the tracking link is not applied by ClickDimensions. Hopefully the image below is visible and can show what happens:

The same Email Template/HTML code used above was sent with Campaign Monitor to the same Outlook user and Campaign Monitor was able to substitute their tracking link. So it is definitely technically possible.