Over the holiday weekend, we had dinner with some friends who own a small franchised business. I support them in their endeavor by making a purchase here and there, and by receiving their email newsletter about upcoming events and specials.

At the end of dinner I asked them about their newsletter and how they created it, because honestly it was pretty ugly. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, both ASCII and HTML-based, so I was hoping to give them some advise from a seasoned reader's point of view and as a past newsletter composer.

I discovered that they composed and formatted the content with Microsoft Word, and cut and pasted this information directly into the application provided to them by their franchiser. Immediately I realized that unfortunately they did not know that at that point they lost all the great formatting they meticulously created with Microsoft Word. And by not sending themselves a copy, they never realized this.

Being in the email business with LoadMail, I suggested some simple operating procedures that I knew would help them never make this mistake again.

1. ALWAYS send a test message with the initial content to a few test email accounts. Or, sign-up for email at any number of FREE web-base providers to give yourself an idea of what your subscribers will see from within their web-based email. You could even register an Internet Domain at Load.com with LoadRegister/LoadDNS and setup LoadMail at that domain for testing purposes.

2. Make your life easy and use any number of HTML composers available, whether proprietary (Microsoft Word, Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Dreamweaver, ...) or open-source (SeaMonkey Composer, OpenOffice Writer, ...) to create your finished product. Unless you are an HTML expert, this is going to save you an amazing amount of time and frustration.

3. ALWAYS check any included images or URL links to make sure you are not adding content only viewable on your local area network or local computer.

4. ALWAYS use spell-check. It is amazing how many legitimate newspapers even forget this step.

5. ALWAYS include yourself on your final outgoing email newsletter so that you can be sure of the finished copy.

With those simple guidelines I think that their next newsletter is going to look 100% better.