Speakin' Mumbo Jumbo

Ever seen an email where the subject line looks more like hieroglyphs or modern art than a legible typography? Through our deliverability solutions, we review hundreds of emails daily from the world’s top brands across a broad range of industries. We see great subject lines but, unfortunately, we also see many “broken” ones.

Curiosity led us to ask “what’s causing subject lines to look so ‘broken’?”After an initial round of investigation, we identified an alarming trend in the productionof email: the use of word processors like Microsoft’s Word to create HTML email. Unfortunately, as this report will show, the effects of copying characters & code from Microsoft Word into a deployment system can be devastating to your brand.

Once we identified a potential source for the broken characters,we did more investigation to better understand how language is transferred from one computer to another and then rendered. This brought us into close quarters with two concepts, ASCII and Encoding, that are often kicked around the industry as standard nomenclature but rarely understood or treated with enough respect.

We’ve learned that those who don’t respect the limitations of ASCII and the importance of choosing the right encoding, risk losing their well thought-out subject lines in a storm of characters and glyphs that can’t be understood by the most astute linguist much less the rest of us mere mortals.

This report covers our findings and provides practical, understandable advice on how you can avoid speakin’mumbo jumbo to your customers.

Download & read the full study here   Pivotal Veracity - Speaking Mumbo Jumbo