It’s true. In general, humans simply don’t do well with change.
Though I’m OK with change, somehow, when Aweber rolled out their new editor sometime ago, it just stuck in my craw.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been with Aweber almost 10 years.
Maybe because I take so long with Email already I just want to get in, out and be done.
Who knows?
Having said all that, there’s one thing about me that has served me very well.
I won’t let tech kick my butt. I’ll dig in and wrestle till I can pin it down good.
Good thing always come out of that – usually, but that’s another story for another day. This time, my effort and time spent understanding Aweber’s editor pays off every week. This is why.
A Better Editor for Email
Sometime last year, I was hired to create an HTML email. I’ve never been too keen on doing them because it is easy clients who aren’t familiar with HTML to mess it up.
It doesn’t help when most email systems don’t come with a good HTML editor customized for emails.
I did it anyway – something about challenges that’ll be the death of me one day.
Sure enough, not a week into using the carefully crafted template, the client come back and kept coming back because it didn’t look right. Not like the issue I had done for them. I anticipated this.
You see, when it comes to HTML for emails, it’s like a throw back to the early 90’s. Despite all our new fangled technology today, email readers don’t do external stylesheets or CSS well.
Many also don’t like paragraph tags so you have to use two line breaks to make it look like paragraphs. Horrors!
This normally wouldn’t be an issue, but remember when I said most email services have bad HTML editors?
That’s because when you press enter in the editor, it creates a paragraph – not line break. It doesn’t matter how well a job I do a creating a newsletter template, clients will always mess it up because the HTML editor doesn’t understand paragraphs don’t play nice in emails.
It’s funny how many email services don’t even try to fix something as basic as that. And, for a long time, Aweber‘s old editor did that.
That’s why I never sent HTML emails. Until now. The new editor does a much better job with this.
Fixed Templates
Anything ‘fixed’ doesn’t sound very good but it is! If there’s one lesson I learned over this year it is making unbreakable templates. It’s easier on me, and makes a ton of sense when outsourcing.
This is what I mean by fixed, unbreakable templates. Take a look at my email newsletter design below.
See those areas I marked as constant? With Aweber’s new editor, I can do that. So, when I ask a VA to send a newsletter or add an autoresponder using this template, I know they won’t accidentally delete my logo, the signature or mess up the HTML so the whole template looks all crazy.
The results are consistent whether I did it, a VA did it or a new intern without HTML knowledge did it.
Fixed templates make email creation fast too since all I have to concern myself with is the content. Not the design or taking care not to break the design.
If you’d like to learn more about HTML email creation, here are two things to do.
1. Learn or brush up your basic HTML skills.
2. Stay tuned to my newsletter for an announcement to help you with this. If you’re not signed up yet, join us.
