Sending HTML Emails in Aweber

This had been bugging me for a long time.  I finally figured it out and thought it was worthy of a blog post.

When sending emails with Aweber you are presented with two boxes where you can put your email… one for html and one for text.  For years I have been just been using the text email option figuring that text emails are going to be the most accessible to the most number of people.

Aweber has a neat feature for tracking the number of times the links in your emails are clicked.  The problem with this is that it turns all your links into these big ugly tracker links that nobody wants to click.  I also like to include a signature in my emails with links to this site and my Twitter so those end up getting converted too.  But if you send html emails you can fix this!

Here’s how you do it…

From within the Aweber html editor highlight your URLs and click the “link” icon at the top of the editor.  Then paste your URL in the “Link Text” and “URL” boxes and click “Apply”.  This will tell Aweber that your URL is a link and it will also display it correctly when you turn the link tracker on.

For about a week I switched and started sending html emails instead of text emails.  The stats were great.  I could even split test and find out which headlines got the most people to open my emails.  However, sending only html emails boosted the spam detector up to 2.7 because apparently spammers are known for sending a lot of html emails with just an image and a link.  Not horrible, but not great either.

I finally found the solution in of all places… on the Aweber site!

It seems that the trick is to create your email in the html editor first and then copy and paste that email into the text editor.  You don’t have to worry about people receiving the same email twice.  Aweber will send both the html and text emails but the end user will only see the version that their email program supports.

So there you go.  Now you can send out your Aweber emails with all the fancy tracking features, your links won’t look like crap, and you can assure that your emails are being delivered to the maximum number of people.