What’s My Biggest Ezine Headache and How To Avoid It?

Once or twice a year I send out a marketing ezine that doesn’t arrive the way it should. Here’s how I make this mistake and how you can avoid it.

When you use text from an MS Word document and paste it into an email, hyphens, quotes, apostrophes and characters other than numerical or alphabetical ones look fine, but watch out. When you send the email to someone, these hyphens, quotes, apostrophes all get turned into /s or ?marks or other unusual and unintended characters. Even though you wrote the best newsletter in the world, it looks silly when it arrives.

Try it. Send yourself an email with hyphens, quotes, apostrophes and see what it looks like when you get it. The email you thought was letter perfect will arrive a mess.

The same thing happens when you send an HTML newsletter, hyphens, quotes, apostrophes turn into odd characters. Even if you preview your HTML newsletter in a browser window you won’t catch this problem. The unintended transformation happens when the ezine is sent.

Avoiding this techno goof is easy. I just paste my completed ezine into a text only editor and then go through it and replace each hyphen, quote and apostrophe with the text editor’s version. Then when I paste the finished version into my ezine broadcast system or use it to create an HTML email so my readers get the what I want them to get, a professional looking marketing newsletter. – Charlie Cook