Don’t set your emails too narrow like I did. This is a better way…

Once again I learned the hard way when it came to email formatting.

I had been advised by the training inside the John Thornhill Ambassador program to shrink my emails to a width of 35-42 characters.

I determined a width of 37 characters worked best.

But this was outdated advice! 

There is now something called “Mobile Responsive” that saves the day!

It is something that AWeber and other email service providers build into their email editors. 

You can create a version of your email optimized for a desktop…

…then the code inside the email detects the device of the reader…

…and optimizes the content. So on a cell phone, it will shrink things down to the right width.

All the text will appear properly and not bleed past the right edge or have awkward lines of text that are too short… Like this
would be an example
of
text being jumbled across multiple rows.

BUT…on AWeber you have to use the “Drag & Drop Email Builder” to get this power of “Mobile Responsive” design.

(Source: https://help.aweber.com/hc/en-us/articles/205012237-What-is-the-difference-between-Mobile-Responsive-and-Mobile-Friendly)

I couldn’t easily convert the Raw HTML version of emails I already had in AWeber…

I had to do the following:

  1. Create new emails in the “Drag & Drop” builder.
  2. Copy and paste the Subject line from the old to new email.
  3. Copy and paste the Preheader line from the old to new.
  4. Copy and paste the content of the old email into https://word-wrap.net/go/.
  5. Unwrap my text.
  6. Copy and paste unwrapped text into the old email while keeping the link and lists from the old email intact
  7. Copy and paste links and lists into the new content, because pasting from the word-wrap.net site removes the hyperlink and causes lists to get scrunched instead of set one line at a time.
  8. Remove any extra link and list text used to fix text back up.
  9. Save old email.
  10. Copy and paste this updated old email content into the “Drag & Drop Builder” version of the email. 
  11. Save the new email.
  12. Once I have done this for all the emails in an AWeber campaign, I edit the campaign.
  13. I then add the new versions of these emails and remove the old versions and save my campaign.
  14. I’m finally done updating that campaign with better looking emails that aren’t too narrow on non-cell phone devices.

I then realized the emails seemed too wide on desktops…but I’ll save that story, and how I solved that problem, for tomorrow.

This all might be easier to do on a different email program…

There might be a better way to do it on AWeber…

If you know, I’m all ears!