I’ve always tested my newsletter before hitting the “send” button. I test it by sending it to myself — sometimes three or four times. I check to make sure the links work, that the line breaks are ok, and that I haven’t misspelled anything.
But it wasn’t until I opened a Yahoo account that I realized newsletters which looked perfectly fine in Eudora (my e-mail program) looked terrible in Yahoo’s program. Including my own!
When this happened, I called Jessica Albon, President of The Write Exposure. Jessica specializes in producing e-newsletters for small businesses and is much more technical than I. (She’s also made the second round of Fast Company’s “Fast 50”!)
Says Jessica, “As you discovered, your e-newsletter looks different to your readers than you might expect. That’s why it is so important to test your newsletter in a variety of programs. The reason some of the newsletters you are viewing have problems has to do with the ‘header section’ — the most common cause of problems for HTML e-mail.”
Jessica sent me a very long, technical explanation of what a “header” is and how it determines what your reader sees in her e-mail window. What follows is a highly simplified explanation — which I include only because I’m a firm believer in the power of understanding how things work.
The “header” is the information contained at the top of an e-mail message. It tells the e-mail program how to “read” and thus “present” the information contained in the message.
The header for a simple text e-mail includes this information: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
The header for an HTML newsletter, however, typically looks like this: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”ztUhI4XInF8W”
These are only two options for headers. There are many more and some distribution programs add extra things to headers, which is usually where the problems start.
Says Jessica, “If you use an e-newsletter template program such as Constant Contact, the header issue is usually taken care of for you so you don’t have to worry about it so much. But if you’re formatting and sending your newsletter out yourself or through a distribution program, it’s imperative you test it as many ways as possible.”
Jessica gives the following tips for formatting and testing your e-newsletter:
1. When writing a text newsletter, use a program such as TextPad (http://wwwtextpad.com). A general purpose editor for plain text files, TextPad will automatically wrap lines for you at a set character number — as opposed to manually counting and doing hard returns in NotePad (which is what I’ve been doing for two years). To eliminate faulty line breaks, most experts recommend a 60 – 65 character line count.
2. If you do an HTML newsletter, you should still write your content in TextPad as the program also eliminates the problem of non-ascii characters, such as em dashes and smart quotes, showing up like this: “.
3. All newsletter publishers should view their newsletters in AOL, Outlook, Hotmail, and Yahoo. AOL offers a 5-hour “Sampler Plan” for $9.95 a month. If you use Microsoft Office, you probably have Outlook on your computer. Hotmail and Yahoo accounts are free.
4. Understand how various e-mail programs work. That way, if a subscriber complains about how your newsletter looks, you can start the diagnostic process with his/her e-mail settings.
(After talking with Jessica, I spent a good hour with Eudora. Who knew I could press a button titled, “Blah, blah, blah” to read headers and set my options so I no longer see graphics or the “Preview” screen?)
Thank you, Jessica, for your help with this article. It was quite enlightening!
You can learn more about Jessica — and subscribe to her newsletter, Newsletters in Focus, at: http://www.designdoodles.com
Dianna Huff specializes in results-oriented B-to-B marketing writing.
For your free “Top Ten Marketing Writing Mistakes” list and a complimentary
subscription to Dianna’s monthly e-newsletter, “The MarCom Writer,”
go to http://www.dhcommunications.com/resources.htm.
