What the heck is 7-BIT ASCII?

Many of you seasoned email marketers may already know this but many email services will not properly read some standard punctuation marks and other symbols. (This is one of the simple, but very important little tips I am learning as a result of using Responsys for the NextStudent email campaigns.) For example, if you use only a typed apostrophe when typing the word you’re - your customers may actually see a little square in place of where the apostrophe should be. To ensure this doesn’t occur, I highly recommend using 7-bit ascii. What is this? This is basically a symbol/number combination that is used within the HTML of any text to represent a symbol.

If you use Dreamweaver to create your emails, you can simply type an “&” in place of your punctuation mark and a list of all of the ascii strings will be provided for you. Just make sure you are doing this within the code view and not the design view. Just a warning, this list is a bit long and it can be a little tedious at times trying to find the correct symbol. For an easier solution, W3Schools has a great reference page listing all the standard symbols.

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