Emails made easy. . .

At the end of yesterday’s post I mentioned the great little tool I found that is perfect for anyone who sends plain text emails. This is a great time saver and, initially, I was just going to include it in the Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox.

But then I decided it is so handy I didn’t want to wait for the toolbox to be ready (it’s coming along but checking everything is up to my high standards takes time ) and I didn’t want you to miss out if the rest of the toolbox is not right for you at the moment.

Let me explain why I like this little tool.

Many email marketing experts advise sending plain text emails. Although html emails look prettier they don’t always get through - a lot of people only accept plain text email - so where possible we are advised to have a plain text version as well.

If you use an autoresponder to send your marketing messages - such as Aweber - you may have the facility to set up both a plain text and html message.

Now, the problem with plain text is that email clients handle the text differently and in some cases can cause the lines to break up so they look ugly and even alter the sense of the message.

Aweber’s message set up screens offer a word wrap facility. Problem is, their word-wrapping is ignored by Outlook - and for all I know it may be ignored by other email clients. I’ve had my test messages come through where most of the lines break at 60 characters (the recommended line length) because I’ve put in manual line breaks and then you suddenly get a longer line appear, where my manual line break has been ignored.

This utility - I’ve dubbed Emails Made Easy - breaks the text up for you at a simple click of a button and, to my delight, the formatted text comes through OK on my Aweber test message.

This is what the screen looks like:

You can see how the text expands across the box. At the bottom you get stats of number of characters, words, sentences, lines and paragraphs.

After clicking on the Format button the text is formatted to the selected line length of 60 characters:

For me, it certainly beats the time consuming frustration of manually splitting the lines.

This is free to download and you can pass it on to anyone you think will find it useful.

Right click the link below and choose Save Target As or Save Link As

Emails Made Easy Download

The zip file is just over 1 Mbyte and contains a file called eme.exe. Extract the file and double-click it to install the utility on your system. It comes with an uninstall script if you decide you don’t want to use it any longer.

Lots more to come…

~ Carol Bentley