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7 QUICK TIPS For Formatting Your Text E-mail To |
Did you know that how you format your e-mail can literally make or break the success of your e-mail campaign? It's true... If you make mistakes formatting your e-mail to your customers and subscribers, you risk looking unprofessional, destroying your credibility, and having your hard work tossed in the trash without ever being read! After all, why should readers consider the product recommendation of someone who doesn't even know how to format an e-mail correctly? Remember that different e-mail programs will display your e-mail differently. Plus, different people will have their personal program set to read their incoming mail in different fonts, different sizes, different widths, etc... So to ensure that, on average, readers have a similar view of any correspondence you send them, follow these simple formatting tips... 7 Quick Tips For Formatting Your Text E-mail 1) Use a good text editor. As wonderful as Microsoft Word may be, it is NOT the tool to be using when formatting e-mail copy. To skip the quirky formatting mistakes and avoid the frustrating comedy of errors Word frequently generates in a situation like this, I highly recommend using a good text editor. My personal favorite is UltraEdit-32, which you can download for a free 45-day trial at http://www.ultraedit.com/downloads/index.html (Registration is $30.) However, Notepad and Wordpad, which come with Windows and can be found under Programs>Accessories in your Start menu, will do the trick as well. 2) Set your line length to 65 characters. Have you ever received an e-mail that looked like this? > You might be wondering how anyone could ... I'm sure you've probably received e-mail that looks like this before. It's not only hard to read, it's annoying! Fortunately, it's a mistake that's easily avoided by setting your line length to 65 characters (or by setting your right indentation to 2.5"). The typical default width your readers' e-mail clients will open to is 65 characters, so by setting your line length to this width, you'll avoid having long lines of text cut off and displayed like in the example above. 3) Use hard carriage returns (i.e. press "Enter") at the end of each line. Some older e-mail clients don't actually have "word wrap," so to avoid having your e-mail appear as one long line of text that readers will need to use the horizontal scroll bar to read, manually press "enter" at the end of each line (i.e. every 65 characters). 4) Use a fixed-width font.
For example, This is Courier. As you can see, Courier consistently uses the same amount of space to display each character, while Arial varies in width. This is important because the majority of e-mail clients use fixed-width fonts as their default (the exception being Eudora, which defaults to Arial). While an e-mail formatted in a fixed-width font looks good when displayed in a font like Arial, an e-mail formatted in a font like Arial looks terrible displayed in a fixed-width font. By formatting your e-mail in a fixed-width font, you'll ensure that it looks good no matter what font your reader's e-mail client defaults to. 5) Spell check and proofread everything! While I'm the first to admit that everyone makes mistakes now and then, there is absolutely no excuse for the blatant errors I see made in many e-mail promotions I receive. Remember that spelling mistakes and poor grammar make you look unprofessional and damage your credibility. So before clicking "Send," take that extra minute to spell check your work and have a couple of other people read it. You may save yourself some embarrassment... and prevent lost sales! 6) Keep paragraphs 4-5 lines in length -- no longer! By keeping your paragraphs 4 to 5 lines in length, you ensure that your e-mail is easy to read. The more white space you use, the better. Long, never-ending sentences that run on for 8 lines get very difficult to read, causing readers to become frustrated and delete your e-mail. 7) Test, test, test! Before sending your e-mail to your entire list, take an extra 15 minutes to test how it looks in a variety of e-mail clients such as: Eudora -- free versions at http://www.eudora.com As well as in a couple of web-based e-mail clients such as:
By setting up these different "test accounts," you'll give yourself the opportunity you need to fix any problems and guarantee that all of your subscribers receive the same professional looking e-mail. Final Thoughts: It won't matter if you've spent a year writing your copy. If the format of your e-mail doesn't make your text easy to read, then you'll be no further ahead. A professionally formatted e-mail makes you look like a credible business owner who takes what you do very seriously. It invites readers to examine your e-mail... check out your offer... and seriously consider making a purchase based on your recommendations. Which basically means, professional formatting translates into increased sales! And I think you'll agree, there's nothing wrong with that.
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