We’ve all received those “oops” emails and if you’ve been in this business long enough to be a little (or a lot) jaded, you probably thought BS. They’re just doing that to sneak a second email by me. That does happen. It is a known strategy. I’ve never done it nor would I lie to my list like that so when it happens to me, I struggle with should I send the “oops” follow up email or not.
This just happened to me this week. I sent out an email promoting Marlon Sander’s “” and I messed up the affiliate link. Yea, of all the things to screw up. 
I received two email from subscribers about it, which is cool. But one was snarky, the tone being “how dare you be so lazy that you didn’t even bother to hyperlink the link – do you expect ME to copy and paste the link onto my browser”. Relax dude, I just messed up.
Anyway, I fixed the links and re-sent the email. But then I almost made a second mistake!
My mistake was simple but sales killer so I figured I would share it with you.
One simple but invisible space character caused this:
When I copied and pasted my affiliate link, I over shot my cursor by one space, creating a blank space. Aweber’s editor doesn’t like blank spaces and most HTML editors do this as well, so they added a special character to fill in the space. In this case it was “%20“. And that’s all it took to kill my link.
The end result was a dead link that took my subscriber here:
Therefore Aweber’s HTML editor added a character for the blank space changing the link from this:
To this:
That little blank space can be a little bugger if you’re not careful!
I always test my promotional emails out before queuing them up but that little space I missed. Luckly I clicked on the links to arrive at the 404-Error page and realized I must have messed up again. That’s when I discovered the trailing space mistake.
It avoided me sending an “oops” email with another “oops” email.
Always make sure you test your emails going out to your list. I’ve been doing this along time and I messed up so you can’t get in autopilot mode. Subscribers have little patience for these type of mistakes. Even if they don’t unsubscribe they won’t go further if you send them a dead link or a messed up link sending them to a 404-error page so you probably lost the sale opportunity for that campaign.
Nothing like killing a sale due an blank space character. Email formatting mistakes will cost you money so be triple careful and check, check, check before sending out that email.
Ah yes! That dreaded blank space after the link!
I’ve been done in by that one too and finally made it a routine to delete any blank spaces (in the line) after the link before I hyperlink it! That seems to fix the problem. BTW, I mostly use 1shoppingcart.
But in Aweber? Doesn’t Aweber alert you to problematic links? It won’t let me save an email if there’s a link that’s a bit wonky. Well, unless I insist, but why would I…
Thanks for the cool post!
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