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Just like HTML emails, different email software will display your text-only emails in different ways. While there is no guarantee that your emails will always be displayed as intended, there are a few golden rules you can follow to ensure that the outcome is as close as possible to your original.
The four biggest problems with the display of text-only newsletters are:
- - line lengths
- - links
- - characters
- - justification
Line Lengths
Email software has a nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear like this:
Email software has a nasty habit of breaking up lines of
text in inconvenient
places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can
appear like this.
The solution is to keep lines short and add hard returns at the end of each one. The consensus is that restricting each line to 65 characters offers the greatest protection from jagged formatting problems. When editing and formatting a text newsletter, set your editing software to a width of 65 characters with automatic hard returns.
If your software can't do this, you can simply adjust the margins of your text editor so the lines wrap at 65 characters. Then when you're done, run the cursor or mouse down the side of the page and hit the enter button at the start of every line not already preceded by a hard return.
Links
Often a newsletter will keep to a 65 character line length, only to include a URL which far exceeds this length. Long URLs, just like long lines of text, may be broken into two lines by an email client, so they might look like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/cam/nova/serv45/1234
FG.3456hgrts.html
This makes the URL unclickable, or only the first line is clickable (and takes you to the wrong address). A big email no no. To increase the chances of long URL's being clickable, make sure:
- - all URLs are written in full, for example http://www.yourdomain.com/ and not www.yourdomain.com
- - there is a space immediately before and after the URL.
This can mean unusual punctuation if you put a URL in brackets or at the end of a sentence, for example:
( http://www.yourdomain.com/ ) or;
Visit http://www.yourdomain.com/ .
Under most situations however, it should be possible to rephrase the text so that this kind of odd punctuation is not required.
Using Redirects
If you need to include a very long URL in your email (greater than 65 characters), another approach is to use redirects. You create a page on your website with a shorter URL. When someone follows this short link and reaches the web page, they are automatically redirected to the actual destination URL. For example:
The URL http://www.yourdomain.com/product2/ takes you to a page containing the following HTML code (on one line):
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.thisisaverylongdomainn
ame/nov/server45/1234ADFG.3456hgrts.html">
This would redirect the visitor straight on to the long URL, but your link will remain clickable.
As well as ensuring the clickability of links, the redirect approach can also smarten up a newsletter by giving all the outbound links a consistent look. In addition, you can use your website's log files to see how many readers clicked on the link.
If you don't have the time to set up redirects, you can use a free service like TinyURL.com ( http://www.tinyurl.com/ ), which can convert long URL's into something like http://tinyurl.com/6tu . These links are almost always short enough to remain clickable and they never expire.
There is a downside to redirects though. Some people can get confused if you point to a certain website, but the link appears to go to another website. Some readers will question why the end destination URL is not revealed in the newsletter and assume some dark motive. They might assume the newsletter is using a redirect to mask the fact that the link has been paid for, or involves some other financial connection between the newsletter and the end destination.
Characters
Another problem with the display of text-only newsletters is how email clients handle "odd" characters, which is anything outside the standard ASCII character set.
Despite the myriad of modern word processing tools available, it pays to create and edit text-only newsletters using a simple text editor. Email clients will then faithfully reproduce any character you can create.
More advanced word processing software often inserts "odd" characters, such as the trailing dot character or smart quotes, which can cause display problems in some email software. The following characters are absolutely safe to use in your plain-text emails:
- a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
- A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
- 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
- " % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? _
Justification
Our final problem is justification, i.e. the alignment of text on the page. Most email clients display text messages using a fixed-space font (such as Courier).
This means every space and character takes up the same amount of width. Knowing this, you can center and right justify text using the space bar. In this example, hitting the space bar ten times before the text centers the message between the dividers:
*********************************
Text centered
*********************************
The problem is that some email clients are set up to view text in a different font, one without fixed spaces. Look what happens to our centered text in the Verdana font:
*********************************
Text centered
*********************************
The solution is to justify your text so that it still looks passable in other fonts. Be particularly careful when centering or right-justifying text using the space bar.
This help file has been created using excerpts from Mark Brownlow's articles on the Email Marketing Reports website. This is an excellent resource for those wishing to know more about email marketing as a topic.
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