Email Newsletters How-To
October 27th, 2011 by leeA guide for clueless newbies charged with writing and distributing mass emails.
There’s a temptation to create and distribute Microsoft Word documents as email newsletters. This is wrong on many levels. First, you’re helping to support a monopoly. Second, you’re requiring anyone who wants to read your email to also help support that monopoly. Third, you’re requiring people to click something extra to read your content. People are inherently lazy–if the information you want to convey isn’t in front of them when they open your email, it’s less likely they’ll get the message.
Also, email attachments have a long history of acting as vectors for the spread of computer viruses, so many people will refuse to open them.
In addition to helping to spread viruses, Word documents won’t necessarily look the same on your users’ computers. The reason is that Word was not intended as a means of distributing formatted documents. If you must use it, it’s best used as a formattER of documents.
The preferred alternative for mass email is HTML. That’s because HTML can be presented in the email itself.
But, bear in mind that there is a great deal of variation in the way HTML is interpreted by email software–Outlook users on Windows will see one thing, Mac users another, and Yahoo users yet another. Even within those groups, people with their fonts set differently may see different things.
That is, if you allow part of your email to take advantage of the default font–the one the user has set as her preferred font–and other parts of the email specify, for example, Times New Roman, people who set Times New Roman as their preferred font won’t see a difference where you intended to show a font change–and, even worse, if your default font is Times New Roman and you set the font to Times New Roman somewhere in the middle of your email, other people will see their preferred font up to the point in your email where you set Times New Roman, and since you can’t see where you’ve made the change, it could be in the middle of a paragraph!
The best way to combat this, if you can’t examine the HTML, is to remember to keep your formatting as simple as possible; do all your formatting after the text is complete and accomplish it with the fewest possible keystrokes or mouse moves. (This helps prevent redundant markup in your HTML, which can eventually interfere with additional markup and make future reformatting difficult.)
If possible, use email distribution software, like MailChimp. This software helps prevent many common mistakes and helps ensure that your message reaches its intended recipients without annoying anyone. (Well, maybe that’s a little optimistic. It will at least help minimize the number of annoyed people and the intensity of their annoyance.) MailChimp is free if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers.
But, if your boss refuses to allow you to use MailChimp, or any other email distribution software or web app, there are ways you can manage without it. Following are a few tips and pointers for manually managing a mailing list.
First and foremost, don’t put your subscribers’ email addresses in the To: or CC: boxes. This provides the email address of everyone on the list to everyone else on the list. Even if all your subscribers don’t mind providing their email address to everyone on your list, you’re also increasing the probability that all those email addresses will find their way into the hands of spammers.
If one person on your list has a virus on their computer, that virus could harvest every email address in your list and begin sending spam, phishing attacks, or viruses to them all. And, it will be your fault!
So, always use BCC. Put your own email address in the To: box, and put everyone else’s in the BCC: box.
This will, however, slightly increase the chance that your email will be trapped by some people’s spam filters. To combat this, always include a note in your email asking people to add your email address to their email address book.
Next, be sure your email doesn’t depend on any particular screen width. That is, don’t use hard carriage returns–never use the Enter or Return key to end a line unless you intend to insert a blank line. Let the software decide when to wrap words to the next line. That way, your recipients’ software will be able to decide when to wrap words to the next line on their system.
If you use hard carriage returns to wrap, here’s what can happen:
Suppose you write the headline:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
But, on your screen, you run out of space at the word “dog”. You don’t want only the word “dog” on the next line, so you position the cursor after “jumps” and hit the Enter key. Now it looks like:
The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog.
And, you feel pretty good about that arrangement, so you send it in an email. But, when your recipient opens it on a computer where the screen is lower in resolution or the fonts have been enlarged, she may not have enough space for even your shortened line, so what she sees is:
The quick brown fox
jumps
over the lazy dog.
That’s because the recipient’s computer is following your formatting instructions as well as those of the recipient.
The best way to mitigate this is to never use hard carriage returns inside a paragraph, and always plan for your recipient’s email window to be narrower than your own.
You can test for problems by narrowing your email window after you’ve composed your email.
In some cases, though, it’s important to enforce a minimum width. There is probably a point at which your email will look ridiculous if it’s viewed on a narrower screen. You can mitigate that by including an image in your email. Since images can’t be wrapped, they will usually force an email window to widen to accommodate the image.
