Pivotal Veracity has added new technology to optimize email for the Apple iPhone and the BlackBerry Enterprise Service.

The addition to the Phoenix-based company's eDesign Optimizer service is intended to improve the rendering, usability and performance of email. Email service provider Responsys uses Pivotal Veracity's eDesign Optimizer for mobile email rendering for clients such as Continental Airlines. So does another ESP, Silverpop.

With this addition, emails can now render in more than 100 different email clients such as AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Sohu.

Marketers can also view settings including images on and off, above the fold and preview panes and run email across mobile, desktop and Web platforms.

Founded in 2003, Pivotal Veracity offers email deliverability and rendering services to email service providers, advertising agencies and brands such as American Express, Borders, Cisco Systems, Dow Jones, IBM, Nestle, Oracle and Netflix.

The company partners with interactive agencies and email specialists including Avenue A/Razorfish, Digitas, Digital River, ExactTarget, Ogilvy and Yesmail.

Pivotal Veracity has optimized email for mobile platforms such as the BlackBerry IS, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile.

The company claims that it will let marketers optimize emails for more than 90 percent of the worldwide smartphone market with the addition of Apple's iPhone and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server from Research In Motion Inc.

Pivotal Veracity's new offering tackles an issue that has bedeviled the traditional Internet market for years: How do render emails equally on all clients?

For example, an email sent to a Yahoo account will render differently when dispatched to an Outlook account or even AOL or Microsoft's Hotmail or Google's Gmail.

In many cases, the images are suppressed -- as is typically the case with Outlook 7 or AOL -- or the lines appear differently when contrasting the same email in Yahoo and Gmail.

The confusion is compounded when emails are viewed on mobile devices. The same email renders differently on the desktop Microsoft Outlook than it would on devices using Microsoft Windows Mobile Outlook.

It doesn't matter much for personal email, but such disparity in image and rendering defeats a marketer's purpose to showcase a consistent brand image across media and channels.

Marketers typically use email to brand, promote new products or services or handle customer service queries. And more of these emails are first seen on mobile devices such as the business user's favorite, the BlackBerry, or the consumer's top choice, the iPhone, which accounts for one out of four smartphones in the United States.

It is this issue that Pivotal Veracity is tackling. Deirdre Baird, president/CEO of Pivotal Veracity, took some questions from Mobile Marketer's Mickey Alam Khan. Excerpts:

Your case for this mobile email optimization offering?
Both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketers today rely upon email for almost every facet of communications: from acquiring new customers, to converting customer, to communicating with them from a service perspective.

Simultaneously more and more business and a growing number of consumers are relying on smartphones for messaging and browsing the Web. In 2007 smartphones outsold PCs and laptops for the very first time.

When a company sends an email to their customer - whether that customer is a business user or a consumer - that customer can read their email in their traditional PC or on a smartphone or both. If you want to retain your reputation and drive a response, it is imperative to ensure a positive user experience for the recipient.

However, how an email renders in Hotmail versus Outlook 2003 is very different, and it is also different than how it renders in the iPhone. Each email reader has its own nuances in respect to how it renders an email.

Our solution allows a company to easily and effectively view how that email message is rendering across every single major desktop, Web and mobile email reader, and allows the marketer to optimize their email to ensure the best possible performance across all these platforms.

Why the need for optimizing email for the iPhone? Isn't that more of a consumer device than an enterprise device?
In less than a year, the Apple iPhone has exploded in the USA market and is now second only to the BlackBerry in terms of sales - iPhone estimated at 28 percent versus the Blackberry's 40 percent.

It is true that [the iPhone] may primarily be used for consumer purposes but we believe that is changing as business users are often making their own selection on which smartphone to buy. For example, in our company, 25 percent of our staff have purchased the iphone.

Additionally, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced last month that Active Sync will be added in the planned June release of iPhone's 2.0 software. The incorporation of Active Sync opens the iPhone to even more business elite who have depended on smartphones with Microsoft's Active Sync technology in order to keep their mobile phone in harmony with their Outlook.

Pivotal Veracity's clients include both B2B and B2C mailers such as American Express, Nestle, Continental Airlines, Borders, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, et cetera. However, in addition to covering the Apple iPhone, Pivotal Veracity also covers every major mobile platform including BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm Garnet and every major Web-based and desktop reader in the market.

Thus, our clients, whether B2B or B2C, can elect to view and optimize their emails on whatever platforms make sense for their particular audience.

For example, a B2C mailer may elect to optimize against the iPhone and Windows Mobile Outlook for mobile; AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail for Web-based readers; and Outlook and Thunderbird for desktop readers.

A B2B mailer may choose to optimize against BlackBerry and Palm Garnet for mobile; RoadRunner, Comcast and AT&T for Web-based readers; and Lotus Notes and Outlook for desktop readers.

Who's the target for this offering?
Any enterprise who relies on email for communicating with their customer.

Since the use of smartphones is crossing gender, age and demographic lines, it is imperative that enterprises who send emails to their customers ensure the customer has a rewarding and compelling experience with that email regardless of where and how they read it.

What makes the Pivotal Veracity offering different from the others?
We are the only company in the world that allows clients to optimize their email across every major Web-based, desktop and mobile email reader used in both the USA and abroad.

Specifically on the mobile front, we are the only ones who cover 90 percent of the platforms versus 12 percent by our nearest competitor and allow the client to see the full email on the mobile device. Our only competitor can only render the first screen or inch or so of the email.

However, we cover far more than just mobile platforms. We also cover all major USA and international desktop and Web readers as well. We are, for example, the only company to offer rendering optimization on Chinese email readers, for example, Sina, Sohu.

So how does it work? Do you route through email service providers?
A client selects what screenshots they want - for example, Lotus Notes Full Message, Yahoo Preview Pane, Apple iPhone, Hotmail Full Message With Images Disabled - from over 100 different options. The client then simply emails their email to an account we provide them. Our backend system then takes screenshots of the email in all the different views selected by the client and makes those views available to the client via an extensive online reporting system.

Additionally, we also provide a host of other reports that allow the client to optimize their message such as multilingual spell checking, W3C HTML validation, Encoding Analyzer, Link & Image Validation and more.

Our solution, eDesign Optimizer, is a comprehensive solution for ensuring the functionality and cross-platform performance of email messages.

Any ESP signed up to use this service?
Yes. Pivotal Veracity's eDesign Optimizer solution is offered by over 40 ESPs and agencies. So in addition to purchasing a subscription directly from Pivotal Veracity, companies who use these ESPs and agencies can access our solution through them.

Some of these ESPs and agencies include Acxiom Digital, Aprimo, Avenue A/Razorfish, Digital River, Digitas, Eloqua, ExactTarget, iContact, Ogilvy, Responsys, Radica Systems (China), Silverpop, Yesmail, WhatCounts and dozens of others.