If you copy-paste content from a Word doc, Excel, or web page while composing an email in Instantly, your message may contain many different styles.
There are four ways to quickly fix any styling and formatting issues within the copy.
Clean HTML
This feature takes away any unnecessary HTML tags from your email body. Use it if the HTML was pasted from an external source with incorrect formatting that gets triggered with certain input.
It will try to keep any text formatting you've applied (like color, size, etc.) but remove any extraneous HTML structure like ‘div IDs’ that are not really relevant in an email body.
In other words, it cleans up any unnecessary HTML within the body of your emails and tries to match your HTML to what you might get if you were to write your email directly in Gmail.com. It's located in the sequence editor:
Note: It will not change the content of your email, and if you have any links in your email, they will still be clickable.
Clear Formatting
If you are faced with formatting issues like no spaces between paragraphs or different formatting styles applied in the email copy, there is a quick tool that you can use to strip all that formatting away - the Clear Formatting feature.
If in the preview of your email, you see the white text background like this, it means that the text has some leftover formatting that you want to remove.
You should select all text in the editor and click on Clear Formatting. It is located on the text editor bar, in the More Text section.
Then click on the Preview button to double-check if your copy looks exactly like what you want. The preview text will not have a white background after clearing.
Don't forget to Save Changes when you finish editing.
Delivery Optimization tool
Another feature that you can use for sending plain emails is Text-only mode. It strips all HTML formatting and is better for deliverability.
To enable the Delivery Optimization feature in the campaign, please follow the steps below:
Go to the Campaign --> Options tab.
Scroll down, and you will find Delivery Optimization.
Enable Send all emails as text-only or Send first email as text-only
Activate them by checking the box and hitting the Save button.
Once enabled, any images in the email will be removed. HTML links will also be disabled, and the URL will show beside the text it is supposed to be linked to.
Always Send First Email as Text-Only feature
You can enable the Always Send First Email as Text-Only setting to send the first email of every campaign in this workspace as plain text to improve deliverability.
Here are the steps to enable this feature:
Go to the Advanced Deliverability setting
Enable Always Send First Email as Text-Only. This setting applies to all campaigns in the workspace.
FAQ
Q: How to clear formats in an old or an active campaign?
A: To clear format in old or already active campaigns, please follow the steps below:
Select all of the text and then press "command (or Ctrl on Windows) + x" to cut the text.
Once the editor is blank, press "shift + command (or Ctrl on Windows) + v" to paste it without styling.
Q: How long does it take for changes to take effect?
A: It can take up to 24 hours for changes to take effect.
Because of this, you might still see that some sent emails from the day you made these changes still appear with weird styling. This happens because the emails to be sent for the day have already been processed, and are not interrupted by any recent changes until your campaign is processed again the next day.
To prevent sending more emails with weird formatting, it's recommended to pause the campaign, make and save the changes, then resume the campaign.