HTML email charachter encoding question

I've been doing HTML emails for some time now. I recently had a problem where a recipient got the email with the character entity I coded showing like this:

Center's (instead of Center's)

Actually, it is a pain to code an apostrophe every time it comes up. My question is, is it better to just put a meta tag like this is the head for utf-8 encoding and type the characters normally?

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

In the years I've been doing HTML emails, this always confuses me.

Thanks

Just copy and paste the meta tag. Makes everything much easier.

Thank you very much!:D