In general, it's not a good idea to use Word or Publisher to create email campaigns. Below we'll show you what kind of messy code gets sent when Word is used to create a newsletter. When you use Word and paste it into a content editor, a lot of the formatting become unchangeable, you can't insert line breaks or you'll end up with delivery problems (your campaign ending up in junk mail folders!). It gets nasty.
Behind the Scenes
If you don't know HTML, and need help creating it, we don't recommend using MS Word or Publisher. It's tempting to create a nice looking page in Word, then hit the "Save As HTML" button, but what you get is hideous code.
For instance, let's just say you want to send a simple HTML message that says:
"MailChimp is Cool".
This is the code you'd use in your HTML email if you did it by hand:
This is the code you'd get if you wrote that in Microsoft Word, then "Saved As HTML":
Ay Caramba! That's a lot of extra junk in there. That was just for a simple sentence, too. Imagine what it would do if you included images, tables, and links in the email! Keep in mind, some ISPs filter based on content and code that we're sending through together, so all this extra from Word can get your campaign blocked, and that's never a good thing!
OMG, can you fix it!?
To keep this from happening, when you copy your content over from Word into the MailChimp editor we'll strip out the junk code (and with it, most of the formatting) and paste your text content into the editor in a way that makes it usable. You can use the paste from word button on our content editor. Or just paste your content right into the editor and we'll handle it.
Alternately, you can create your content in the body of an email in Outlook (not as an attachment), and use the Email Beamer to create a campaign.