How to Avoid Weird Characters in Email Subject Lines

Occasionally, we get emails from law firms and other third parties with weird characters in the subject lines. For example, got this today:

Levick’s High Stakes Newsletter May 2008

It's clear that the character that was supposed to be displayed was an apostrophe right before the first "s." Such errors can also crop up in the body of HTML emails.

Why do errors like this occur? when using email marketing software, clients often copy and paste text from MS Word or other applications directly into the text box for the subject line (instead of typing the subject line from scratch). What they don't realize is that certain copied and pasted characters such as apostrophes, quotation marks, etc., may not be interpreted by the software as plain text. The result is that weird characters are displayed to the recipient instead of the intended character.

The simple way to avoid this is to retype any special characters such as apostrophes, quotation marks, question marks, etc. after copying and pasting the content into the subject line box. Retyping the special character renders it as plain text for the software (note: this usually does not need to be done for normal letters, just special characters).

Of course, before sending your email to your entire contact list, it's important to send test emails to several recipients to confirm that everything looks good. Then send to your contacts.