The "Ideal" E-Mail Newsletter Width

After Larry Chase's comment last month about settling on 58-characters as the maximum width of his newsletter I asked for some feedback. Here some of our reader comments:

It All Depends

"Our ezine, Canine Times (http:/www.cfnaonline.com/caninetimes/) is heavily read by a consumer audience. Up until three months ago, we used carriage return/linefeed hard returns at line ends, which were set at 55.

"We did a survey and found that there were unspoken complaints about the narrow width. In particular, it impacted on the horrid long urls used by some associate programs. The newbies on the net simply don't know how to cut/paste and anything not immediately easy-to-use causes them to put it aside. Since then, we have changed to 65-character format, retaining use of hard breaks at each line end. Our readers have responded positively.

"IMHO, the decision should be based upon audience. A business audience is going to be using the hand-held devices more so than a consumer audience. Another thought is the content being delivered. Our readers are home readers. We've been told that many print out our ezine and relax on the couch in the evening to read it. Wow. They prefer the longer format.

Thus, my conclusion is deliver what the audience type prefers/needs and adjust accordingly when they are business versus consumer/lay audience. -- Sunni Freyer, CFNA Inc: The PR Agency (http://www.cfnaonline.com), Pullman, Washington

Too Long

Using the bottom scroll bar to read information on a computer screen is always a chore. Your 65-character lines are too long. Please revise to a 60- or 58-character line. -- Tom, Hunter Employment (http://www.hunteremployment.com)

Our Conclusion

After thinking about this question for a month, I think we'll stay with our 65-character lines. Yes, it's too long for some like Tom. But since we use a great many URLs, many of them quite long, I think it would be wiser to have longer lines so fewer of them will wrap to the next line.