We keep a couple of seed accounts that collect e-newsletters and promotions from many brands across the Internet. It's a good way of benchmarking best (and worst) practices that are being used. One thing that has been alarming is the increased deployments of misformatted campaigns. We are often seeing marketing organizations (large and small) making mistakes such as malformatted personalization tags (resulting in the subscriber seeing the tag instead of the value from the database field that they were trying to specify), mistyped dynamic content statements, and completely unrenderable HTML messages. I totally support the industry-wide migration from broadcast messaging to targeted personalization, but marketers need to be cognizant of the fact that increased complexity warrants increased testing and care.

One cause for these errors is the use of WYSIWYG editors. What you see isn't necessarily what you get, regardless of the type of editor you are using. Almost any editor, if used in its non-code "design view" for multiple iterations, will leave extraneous code in the email template that you are creating. Sometimes this code is harmless. But, sometimes this code can completely impair the template altogether.

A practice that can perpetuate these issues is copying and pasting from other applications into a WYSIWYG editor. For example, HTML-challenged people who try to create a message in Microsoft Word before copying directly into an email platform are often copying errors that they can't necessarily see. Deliverability, reputation management and email rendering expert Pivotal Veracity wrote a great whitepaper on this issue called "Speakin' Mumbo-Jumbo (press release with description, whitepaper)" which explains exactly why this phenomenon occurs.

So, should you abandon your HTML editor altogether? Not necessarily. Simple text changes don't seem to cause issues, so if you are reusing a template without making changes to links, images or other HTML, you might be on the safe side. Advanced editors like Dreamweaver seem to fare better as well. But, there definitely are two practices in which everyone should engage to ensure error-free deployments:

1. Whether you are an HTML expert or not, have someone else check your template. This person might be able to spot any mistakes or extraneous code that might be in your email.
2. Employ the use of email rendering solutions like Pivotal Veracity's e-Design Optimizer, ReturnPath's Email Preview, Habeas' Content Check, or some version of one of these tools that your Email Service Provider has embedded into their application. These solutions will help you see exactly how your message renders in multiple email clients.

Of course, if this all sounds like a lot of work, here's my recommendation: outsource the mundane aspects of your program to your Email Service Provider. Your team should be focused on strategy and ROI, not rote production work. I think that's valid advice for almost every aspect of your business...not just your email marketing program.