If your email campaign was designed in MS Word and, when you test it to yourself, it is coming out with funny symbols or question marks all over the place, it means that the encoding on the document is wrong (this is applicable to both loading a Word document as a template, as well as copying and pasting your Word content into the Online HTML editor).

These symbols usually appear where there are bullet points, smart quotes, special characters, dashes, ellipses or a large amount of spaces. It isn't recommended that you use some of those things in your email campaigns (especially if you use a lot of spaces to move text around, for more on what not to use in your Word design click here) but if you have to have any of those things in your email campaign (especially bullet points and smart quotes, as they are very common), follow the below steps to fix the encoding on your document:

Microsoft Office 2007

• When you have your email template open, click on the Office Button
• At the very bottom of this menu, look for Word Options
• Go to Advanced Options
• Under Advanced Options, scroll right down to the General Tab
• Under the General Tab, go to Web Options
• Under Web Options go to the Encoding Tab
• Under Encoding, change the drop down menu underneath where is says "Save this document as:" to say "Unicode (UTF-8)" (The default is usually Western European)
• While you have Unicode (UTF-8) selected, you can also select the checkbox that says "Always save Web Pages in the Default Encoding". This will make Unicode (UTF-8) your default encoding on Word, and this won't affect any other documents you create.
• Click OK until you are back to your document.

Microsoft Office 97-2003

• When you have your email template open, go to the Tools Menu
• At the bottom of this menu, go to Options
• In the Options Box, go to the General Tab
• Under the General Tab, go to Web Options
• Under Web Options go to the Encoding Tab
• Under Encoding, change the drop down menu underneath where is says "Save this document as:" to say "Unicode (UTF-8)" (The default is usually Western European)
• While you have Unicode (UTF-8) selected, you can also select the checkbox that says "Always save Web Pages in the Default Encoding". This will make Unicode (UTF-8) your default encoding on Word, and this won't affect any other documents you create.
• Click OK until you are back to your document.

Please bear in mind: although you can load a MS Office 2007 document (i.e. a Word document with the file extension .docx) to TouchBasePro, this may also cause problems with your encoding in that you have the correct encoding but the question marks keep occurring. If this happens, re-save the document as a compatible 97-2003 document (i.e. a Word Document with the file extension .doc) with the correct encoding and load it again. This should solve the problem.