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Email formatting guide By David Callan The more likely problem is the format of your email. Ask yourself the following question. Am I sure that everyone can see my email alright? The answer, probably not, but you should be sure, well at least 90% sure because there are always going to be quirky and weird email services and programs out there which display everything differently from the standard way. I presume you understand why email formatting is so important to your email marketing campaign, if not here's a few sentences that should enable you to understand. >Our new product is so When someone opens this email you instantly lose any professionalism and credibility you may have had before. The effect is twice as negative on your sales than the poor copy filled with misspelling problems. This is because people won't bother to even read your email, never mind about them noticing poor spelling and copy. If people don't even read your email then you're not going to make a dime. Making money is what it's all about, that's why email formatting is so important. What can you do the make sure that at least 90% of the people you're emailing your message to can see it properly. Well there are two or three things that stand out in my mind when I'm writing and therefore formatting my emails. First up there's line length, this is what I consider to be the most important element when formatting. It's the main cause of the silly looking email above. Most email readers such as Eudora, Pegasus and both Microsofts Outlook and Outlook express will open on default to line lengths of 65 characters, so all you've to do to avoid the problem is set your line length to 65 characters which equals an indentation of about 2 and a half inches. Doing this will mean that almost everyone you send emails to will all be seeing the same or similar layout. I say almost because some older clients don't have text wrap and your email could display as one long line of text. These clients are dying fast especially as Eudora and Microsoft both offer a free client from their respective websites, but for extra piece of mind always press the return button every 65 characters, doing this will eradicate the problem of older clients. Make sure your paragraphs are short, maybe around five or six lines, anything longer will take up too much space and the reader will most likely find it very difficult to read. Again if someone can't read they also can't buy. Having white space will make your email look and read better so remember five or six lines per paragraph only. The next point to remember when formatting an email is that most email clients use fixed width fonts to display emails. This means that if you're typing and formatting an email in Arial or any other non-fixed width when in fact most of the people that are going to see it have email clients that use a fixed width font such as courier, you can bet your bottom dollar that it's going to look very messy for them. Therefore always type your emails in courier. The courier font looks good even when the person uses an email client which defaults to a non-fixed width font like arial. Currently however the only big name email client that doesn't default to a fixed width font is Eurdora so using arial just doesn't make sense at all. There you have it, the above few pointers should steer you onto the right
track and at least give your Ezine, autoresponder and opt-in emails a
chance of pulling a bit of profit for you.
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