You’ve done everything right. The subject line rocks! The headline is clever. The image could practically tell your story itself. And then it happens. You start testing your e-mail campaign and sneaky little symbols start smiling back at you and you can’t figure out how in the world to get rid of them.
You are now more than aware of the critical role a font plays in an e-mail. Chances are it’s probably a character encoding issue and your selected font and use of special characters like commas, quotation marks and apostrophes are not being read as plain text by your e-mail system.
Here are a few insights to help avoid symbols in your e-mails so your recipient can concentrate on your intended message instead of trying to decode your communication:
• Remember not everyone has the same font styles, so use a universally supported font like Arial, Tahoma or Verdana.
• Try writing content in a text editor tool like TextEdit on a Mac or Notepad on Windows so your copy will be written as plain text to strip out any formatting and alleviate compatibility issues with your e-mail system.
• When all else fails, try retyping the word, sentence or paragraph over in your e-mail system.
• Test, test and retest your e-mails so you can identify any symbols before you hit send, otherwise your carefully crafted e-mail could end up in the spam folder.
Annee Cook is Impact Services eMarketing Team Lead for Daxko.