Clean HTML & Clear Formatting features

How to quickly fix any formatting issue in your email copy.

Marija Zivanovic avatar
Written by Marija Zivanovic
Updated over a week ago

If you are copy-pasting content from a Word doc, Excel, or a web page while composing an email in Instantly, your message may contain many different styles.

You may want to remove individually all of those formatting elements, but, there are a few features that you can use 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.

It's located right next to the preview button in the campaign editor:

Use it if the HTML was pasted from an external source with incorrect formatting that gets triggered with certain input.

This feature will try to keep any text formatting you've applied (like color, size, etc.) but it will 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 will not change the content of your email and also 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 - Clear Formatting feature.

It is located on the text editor bar, in the More Text section:

To use it, select the text in the email body and then click on Clear Formatting.

Always double-check if your copy looks exactly like you want it to look, before launching the campaign. Click on the Preview button.


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:

The preview text will not have any white background after clearing. Don't forget to Save Changes when you finish editing.

To avoid formatting issues like these, simply copy your text onto the Instantly editor by pressing "shift + command (or ctrl on windows) + v" to paste without styling.

This would ensure that all pasted text is always consistent no matter the source which you copied it from.

To edit old or already active campaigns:

  • select all of the text and then press "command (or ctrl on windows) + x" to cut the text;

  • then once the editor's blank, press "shift + command (or ctrl on windows) + v" to paste it without styling.

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, after you've made the changes, pause the campaign and continue sending the following day.


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. You can find it under Campaign Options, Delivery Optimization:

Learn more about the Delivery Optimization feature in this article.


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