53 Of Your Email Subject Lines Are Probably Broken
December 15th, 2009 | 
Author: 53 Of Your Email Subject Lines Are Probably Broken
Do you realize that 53 of your email subject lines are probably broken? According to a recent study by Pivotal Veracity that’s how many email subject lines don’t display as the sender had intended. And if you are doing your own email marketing there is a very good chance that your own subject lines are among those that don’t display properly.
I’m sure you’ve seen something similar to this in your inbox:
Subject: FirstName Here?s Your Daily News”=?
Suspicious looking subject lines like that are a oneway ticket to the Spam Folder. Unfortunately many inhouse email marketers are guilty of this type of garbled text and they don’t even realize it.
If you originally create your email messages in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the message into your email client you might be sending these spamishlooking messages. Without going into a lot of techno mumbo jumbo the reason is basically because email clients assume text is encoded in ASCII. However MS Word defaults to nonASCII characters in several instances. The good news is it’s a very easy fix.
Before you type up your email draft in Word click Tools on the menu bar then choose the AutoCorrectOptions. Next choose the AutoFormat tab and make sure the selections under the Replace options are NOT checked. Then click AutoFormat As You Type and again make sure the options are not selected.
That fix will help keep nonASCII characters out of the body of your email message but the only 100 foolproof method for creating your subject lines is to type it directly into the email client you will be using to send the message. That’s because the subject lines are actually encoded differently than the bodies of the email messages.
Another foolproof method is to create your draft directly in an ASCII text editor. Most Windows computers come with Notepad preinstalled. TextPad is a relatively inexpensive editor that has a few additional features. And while I haven’t personally used it myself I have heard good things about WinEdit.
If you like the ease and comfort of using Word you can always create your original draft in Word and then paste the test into a plain text editor to remove all the nonASCII characters You will then need to paste this new version into your email client. Sure it’s an extra step but you should notice improved delivery rates because of it.
About the writer: Karen Scharf offers several whitepapers free reports and checklists including her FREE CanSpam Checklist and FREE Email PreFlight Checklist. Download your FREE copies at http://www.modernimage.com/freereports.htm.
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