Let's back up and go through this systematically: You wrote a bunch of copy and put it into your email that you'll be sending to all of your subscribers. Next step, craft the perfect subject line. You consult the stars, make some tea, read the leaves, look through some gizzards and decide upon a message certain to capture everyone's attention and promote massive conversions. You open your mailing program, copy and paste the subject line and sit back to savor your impending glory. About 10 minutes later someone comes to your desk with a print out of what they received in their Yahoo! account; the subject line is filled with strange rune-like characters, someone else comes up holding a print out of their Hotmail email, more runes, glory has suddenly turned to fear and desperation. Welcome to the copy and paste zone.
But really, what's happening is not so complicated, it has to do with encoding and character sets. To keep things as simple as possible, and to make sure that your subject lines are as compatible as possible across the greatest number of email clients, you should only use ASCII character sets. ASCII is comprised of 128 characters of which 95 are "printable" and their various codes that identify which letter, number or punctuation it is you're using.
There other character sets, non-ASCII, that help us extend the reach of our communication to encompass foreign languages and make our documents more presentable. The latter is the culprit of the strange rune like characters that obliterated your subject line.
Microsoft Word and other MS Office products (and this extends to other rich word processing software), utilizes characters that are not ASCII. Some of these include quotes that are slanted to the right or to the left. If you look at the ASCII chart above you'll see the quotes run up and down. I know, subtle, but important.
When you're writing your document and you see a slanted double quote or an apostrophe/single quote, those are not base ASCII. When copy and paste those "smart quotes" and pop them into your subject line, you're encoding things that are beyond the character set most people use to send their emails, ISO-8859 or Latin 1. What you deliver is something that isn't from the right character set and isn't interpreted correctly by the email client.
Be careful about copy and pasting things that are going to be encoded and then read later by a receiving email client. Dashes are also problematic, there are em-dashes and en-dashes, the first is longer than the 2nd and happens not to be part of the printable ASCII character set. We've put together a study on this called Mumbo Jumbo that contains more useful information for marketers who may still be uncertain what all this character set and encoding truly means and the implications it holds for their marketing programs. Feel free to download it and read it at your leisure. Bottom line is this, take the time to type things out, copying and pasting won't always copy what you see, but quite a few unseen elements, that when pasted will cause havoc on your subject lines and email content.
Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
www.pivotalveracity.com
Director of Partner Relations
& Industry Communications
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