Pivotal Veracity Adds Apple iPhone to Optimization Tool

E-mail deliverability concern Pivotal Veracity today announced it has added the Apple iPhone to its eDesign Optimizer rendering product.

As a result, marketers using eDesign Optimizer can see how their messages look on an iPhone along with the other desktop and mobile devices the service already covered, such as AOL, Sohu (the Chinese Internet service provider), Yahoo, Outlook, Lotus notes, RIM, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Pivotal Veracity claims its clients can now see how their e-mails look and optimize them for 90% of the rapidly growing smartphone market—an area becoming increasingly important for e-mail marketers to address.

Smartphone sales are expected to climb 31.7% in 2008 to 27.3 million units, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Last Sept. 10, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the 1 millionth iPhone had been sold, just 74 days after the product launched. It took the iPod two years to reach the 1 million mark, Jobs said.

One of the biggest challenges facing e-mailers is that they never know where their messages are being read, on a Blackberry, on the Web in Yahoo, on a smartphone, or on a desktop in Outlook, said Deirdre Baird, chief executive of Pivotal Veracity.

Besides showing how e-mail messages appear on all the various devices, eDesign Optimizer will also validate the message’s links and images, tell the sender if their links and images are loading too slowly, and if their messages are larger than 20 kb, which will affect its ability to load on a mobile device, said Baird.

“It’s an entire solution for looking at your e-mail and seeing if it is going to perform well in all these different environments,” she said. “Every company’s customers are reading their e-mail in a variety of different readers and the experience that customer has can be dramatically different from one to another.”

Edesign Optimizer runs anywhere from $1,500 to $2,500 per month. However, 40 e-mail service providers and agencies offer the service to their clients, as well.

According to Baird, the only two top-tier ESPs that don’t offer it are eDialog and Epsilon.