In times of business need, we often turn to the one piece of business productivity software that many of us can’t live without — Microsoft Word.
However, if you use Word to compose your email marketing communications, it is important to understand what goes on behind the scenes as you type.
Though you can’t see it happening, Word keeps track of an incredible number of internal styles, code snippets, comments, and other items. These bits of information are critical to Word, but when you copy that text and try to paste it somewhere else (like Bronto or an HTML editor), all of the invisible stuff comes with it.
In fact, the last thing you ever want to do is copy from Word and paste the content — and all of the hidden codes — directly into the Bronto rich text editor. As you might expect, these invisible codes”can rear their ugly head at the most inopportune moment — after you’ve sent your message and it arrives in someone’s inbox.
Luckily, Bronto provides you with easy ways to clean things up and get rid of all of the undesirable invisible bits. First off, if you’ve got a nicely formatted Word document and you want to carry your font sizes and colors over to your email message, choose “Paste from Word”, the clipboard icon with the Word “W” logo.
Paste your text into the box that pops up, click the options to ignore font face or remove styles if you want, and click OK. This will remove the majority of the extraneous code and leave you with something that looks very close to the way it did in Word.
The other option — and my personal preference — is to choose the “Paste as Plain Text” option, the clipboard icon with a “T” in a yellow box. This will strip out ALL formatting and leave you with the cleanest possible code. Yes, you will need to spend a few more minutes setting your fonts, text sizes, and colors again, but I think the resulting pristine code is worth the time.
As always, we recommend that you fully test your message before sending it out to your contacts. Different mail clients display things in different ways, so just because a message looks one way in the preview in Bronto does not mean it will look that way when it shows up in someone’s inbox.
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