| Email Formatting Gives You a Professional Look
Lately I have been receiving a lot of emails that are not very easy to read. Is it because of the content? No, it is because of the email formatting. I had wondered if it was a problem in my own email formatting setup, but then I realized that I get other email messages formatted for easy reading.
So, my questions to you are, “Are you getting email messages that are all broken up? If so, “do you think you might be sending out the same?” Is the email formatting on your own outgoing mail done correctly?
You know what I am talking about; the text is spilled all over the page. Two words on one line then ten words on the next and then a big white place and a few more words.” It looks very unprofessional and if you are trying to get people to trust in your business, then it should be an absolute must that you send out your email messages formatted correctly. When I receive an email like this I simply hit the back page button and don’t read it.
Now I know for myself and I am sure for you as well, that you want your email formatting done for for easy reading. This is what you need to do. First go and check to see if any of your autoresponse messages that you are sending out look scrambled. If they are perfect when they arrive to you, then you do nothing. I checked and sure enough a few of them in my autoresponder series arrived all broken up! Gasp! My email formatting was not done correctly!
Understanding why your email formatting is doing this is the first step to fixing it. Character count is important. It is the amount of typed letters, signs and spaces on each line. Each email client is different. So if you are using seventy characters and it looks good with your email, but unknowingly send it to someone whose client only allows 60, then your last ten characters will go to a new line. Thus they will be seeing a broken up message and probably one that they will not read. To solve this problem, just limit your character line to say 60-65 characters.
The next problem with your email formatting could be in the font you choose. The default standard is not the best way to go, for the character varies with width. This means that an “I” will take up less character space than a “W” and because of that, the text might end up being taken to the next line after the character count is done. It is best to choose to use a fixed font, sometimes known as mono space font, something like Courier or Letter Gothic.
Do not type your text long enough on a line to use the wrap around feature. It is best to hit enter to go to the next line, also known as a “hard return”. Most of your word processing programs will have somewhere that while you type it displays the line you are typing and the character number, keep tract of it and when you are near your 60-65 limit, hit the return key.
One final way to avoid formatting emails that send out distorted communications is to save them in a universal format. Save your message either in plain text, which is almost always Courier New Font or Rich format, which every word processing can open. Look for these formats in your “save as” dropdown box.
Now that you know the reasons behind the jumbled email and in your email formatting tools you can fix it so that none of yours go out that way. You can send out your email messages formatted for easy reading, and know that they will not only get opened but read.
It will show your professionalism and care that you take in communicating with your email list.
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I’ve been receiving a lot of spam lately and these guys keep on sending links, big files, image links and a whole lot more and guess what, I think some uses the ‘professional’ way of sending emails just to look legit. I don’t know if you can still call that as an email marketing since there were a lot of recipients in the CC field!
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