Email Marketing Tips & Tricks

Formatting Your Email

Choosing a format is one of the key decisions you will make when creating your email campaign. The two main formats are text or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Text e-mails consist of ASCII or Unicode format and contain only characters with no formatting, graphics or font styles.

When sending a text-based e-mail campaign, keep your line length less than 80 characters because with some recipients the lines might not wrap, which means that the 20 characters beyond 80 per line will not be displayed. Keep the line length to less than 70 characters if your message is likely to be forwarded. Forwarded messages are often indented by a tab character, which is usually 8 characters in length.

When creating a link in a text e-mail be sure to include a full web path. HTML allows many types of text formatting (bold and italic text, lists, headline fonts in various sizes, and so on) as well as graphics and other non-text elements. Obviously this is preferable to text, unless you suspect that a large part of your intended audience does not have the ability to display HTML.

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