A Good Tip For Emails

[etoles]

I find it useful to keep email messages easy to read and un-intimidating at first glance. A good practice for this is to make your line lengths less than 70 characters but more than 40 characters.

You can count the characters by pressing all the numbers on your key pad to get a count from 1 to 0 and copying and pasting them beside each other as a scale to follow. Like this:

12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 =50 characters

Repeating the number sequence 5 times has given me a character count of 50characters. Put the scale at the top of your page and make your line breaks at or before the last "0" for each line.

[Del]

I guess it depends on screen resolution but wouldn't the line breaks look weird, at least with some types of content? Run-on lines are annoying but it could make the message look really weird for some people. I tend to write short e-mails or have a return after each sentence or few because that's just how I type, I think it started to separate my rambling to make them easier to read. :/

[Czar]

If you'd like to control line widths simply, why not just deliver emails in HTML format instead of text and limit the width of the display area through CSS or tables?

[Del]

Aren't there occasional problems with e-mail formats other than plain-text?

[Czar]

There sure are, but most email clients that enable HTML delivery also deliver plain text versions of each message to dodge around compatability problems. Limiting line width through HTML would seem simpler than forcing line breaks manually after a certain number of characters. Also, if the layout remains simple and no essential content is image-based, compatability shouldn't be too much of an obstacle.

[Del]

It's been a while since I've used html in e-mails, and I've gotten used BBCode for comunication more than a sentace long, so I was just wondering if there are any special things I should know about html in e-mails or is it basically the same commads used in webpages?

[gophergas]

We used to have a text version of each email newsletter at my day job. One trick I found for automatically limiting the character length was to set up a character limit on my hotmail account. Then, I simply e-mailed the text to my hotmail address and copied the text from within hotmail. It automatically added the breaks at the appropriate length.

We found that less than 1% of our subscribers were looking at the text version, though --- so we quit doing that.

As for html in e-mails, you do need to keep in mind that e-mails can't handle Flash or Java. (A few might --- but they're more the exception than the rule)

Be sure your subject line is really compelling. I've found that asking a question in the subject line often works pretty well. Be careful to avoid sounding "spammy" though.

[Del]

How's "How would you like to work at home, do nothing and earn tons!!1!!111111!??//??///???//" ?
XD

[sellingonline]

Originally Posted by gophergas

We found that less than 1% of our subscribers were looking at the text version, though --- so we quit doing that.

may I ask how you "found" this? As far as I know, there is NO WAY to track who is reading the text version, you can just track, who is reading the html, or do you have some magic hint for me? If so, please tell me, as this would be very helpful, but unfortunately I doubt you did not really track, but more guess, right?

[gophergas]

sellingonline, you are correct that there's no way to track a pure text e-mail in terms of who's looking at it. The number I cited was from the people who, when given a choice, opted to receive the text version of our newsletters. Because the number was so low (less than 1%), we opted to discontinue the text newsletters.

I should have been more precise in my comment. Hope this clears things up.

For what it's worth, some companies are sending out "mock" text newsletters that actually include html code and can be tracked. We haven't gone that route, but we did run a test in which we checked how many people would click a link from a pure text newsletter. We found that the clickthrough rate was considerably lower than what we got in the "designed" html newsletters.

[lauraddirectnet]

It seems that html gets caught in spam and junk mail boxes. Sometimes its easier to send a catchy text email with an inviting link! Has anyone had any luck lately?

[Del]

Laura, you're new. Hi.

[lauraddirectnet]

I am new! hello

[James McConnell]

Hi,

Text style emails are what most serious internet marketers use.

For the simple reason they have a much higher deliverability ratio.

As for how long the character returns are - well the best way like anything online is to test.

If you use a decent auto-responder service provider like Aweber you won't have a problem with any of this as they automate this whole process.

If your email is interesting enough people will read regardless.

That said I like to keep mine broken up like you see here.

That way they are easy to read.

Regards,
James.

[Suresh]

Nice discussion, you guys! Really interesting...cool. I like James' point of view. Clarify your content, make sure its obvious to your reader, use short, conversational sentences that are easy to read. Simple but deadly effective :-)

Success to us all,
Suresh