Email marketing service provider iPost will offer customers content optimization for their mobile devices to help with rendering functionality.

The Novato, CA-based company's Content Optimizer will let firms running email marketing campaigns review their creative content prior to launch in key email clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail as well as Yahoo. IPost worked with Pivotal Veracity, an independent email delivery auditing and optimization firm, to help create Content Optimizer.

"The need that it fulfills for email marketers is helping them identify how their email physically renders in mobile email clients," said Michelle Eichner, vice president of client services at Pivotal Veracity, Phoenix, AZ.

Content Optimizer will also enable iPost customers to validate and optimize the appearance and workability of their emails for delivery to mobile devices using email platforms such as the BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Pivotal Veracity's eDesign Optimizer technology powers Content Optimizer.

What Content Optimizer does is lets users validate that their links are working. The tool also checks to see if the text and HTML render well in all leading email clients and key mobile device email programs.

"From the email marketer's perspective, there are no standards for mobile email clients," Ms. Eichner said. "In other words, what works in a BlackBerry may be different than in a Palm or Windows Mobile 6 [device].

"As an example, images display, although not by default, in Windows Mobile 6," she said. "However, in Palm, images do not display, although they accept alt tags."

The iPost Content Optimizer is packaged with a suite of delivery assurance services from iPost.

The package also includes the Delivery Tracker report from Pivotal Veracity. The Tracker lets the sender audit the entire email delivery process, with reporting on the percentage of messages reaching the inbox, being redirected to the spam folder and being bounced.

Mobile email rendition is increasingly a concern for marketers as more consumers access email on their mobile phones.

"In the traditional email client such as AOL or Hotmail or Outlook, we have the ability to track if someone is reading our email," Ms. Eichner said. "However, in mobile email clients that ability is almost 100 percent lost.

"It works on iPhones because iPhones display images and Windows Mobile 6 also displays images," she said. "But a significant portion of mobile email users are using BlackBerry or Palm [devices] and therefore our tracking capabilities are lost.

"That's a challenge. We then don't naturally know who's reading our email. So you can't run out and design an email because you don't know how it's rendering."