Your Quality Control Checklist
Before hitting that send button, make sure your newsletter passes a test of quality, which will no doubt reflect your own excellent business standards.
Be sure that all of your links work, you haven't (gasp!) misspelled anything, your content is free of faulty line breaks, and you've tested the end product in multiple email clients.
Here is a little checklist to help you with quality control before each mailing:
1. Use a plain text file editor, like TextPad, to generate your lines at a set character number (experts recommend 60-65). This will help you avoid those wacky line breaks. NotePad works for this as well, but you'll have to count characters manually and do a hard return after each line.
2. If you're creating an HTML newsletter, write or paste your text into a program like TextPad or NotePad (TextEdit for Macs), so that content will render free of funky characters that were meant to be something else.
3. Always preview your newsletters in the major email clients, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and Outlook. What looks like a masterpiece in one inbox could look like gobbledy-gook in another!
4. Develop a working knowledge of how various email programs function. That way, if a customer complains about rendering, you can diagnose the problem based on their email settings.
5. Get a second and third opinion; always send your newsletter to a couple of colleagues before sending.