Advice on using Marketo's wysiwyg editor

[Benjamin_Hoopes]

We've run into a number of issues with their wysiwyg and I'm "hopeful" that Marketo has a planned update to make it at least as useful as MailChimp or Constant Contact's.

A few problems we've encountered and I've read up on a number of threads around these subjects, but maybe someone has a different workaround.

1. Spaces before links. I've read about changing from <div> to <p> tags, and vice versa, within the admin section. It appears to work some of the time. We are coming from a much simpler solution, MailChimp, and never encountered additional spaces before any links. The people that work on our emails are more content savvy than they are ready to look "under the hood."

2. Copying/Pasting from other solutions. This one is really weird. We often need to be able to copy/paste from another solution, such as Word or even our website, but Marketo apparently doesn't like this idea. Our typical process is copy from website, place into Word, and then paste into Marketo and adjust to single spacing. MailChimp has a Word option in it's wysiwyg.

Any recommendations on how to fix/improve or knowledge of any incoming updates?

Thanks,

Ben

[Kevin_McMahon1]

Hey Ben,

If you're copying and pasting in to wysiwyg, I recommend doing so within the html code. Pretty tough to get wysiwyg to cooperate and not do weird things so I almost always just make my edits in the code.

If you have ideas, I recommend posting them in Ideas​

[Michael_White]

Agreed -- copying from Word or other Rich Text sources will often lead the WYSIWYG editor to do some really funky things to the code (spans nested within spans within spans -- Spanception, really) -- and could potentially be the source of the weird spacing you're sometimes seeing.

If your users aren't particularly code-savvy and don't want to paste paragraph by paragraph into the HTML code, you can also have them paste the source text as plain-text (cmd/ctrl+shift+v).  Then any tweaks needed to make something a H1/bold/italic/etc can quickly be done within the WYSIWYG rich-text editor, keeping your code tidier and rendering more predictably when it hits inboxes.

[Dave_Roberts]

Hey Ben, here's a few things you could try:

1. Instead of using <div> or <p> elements in the email settings, try choosing "none". That way nothing extra gets added to your HTML and you should get a bit closer to the functionality you expect without the extra "help" from the WYSIWYG. In most cases, using a line-break <br> will suffice for spacing between lines of text/links, etc. As much as possible, I'd try to avoid using <p> elements all-together as each Email Client has a different idea of how to style those, so you've got to rely on CSS overrides to level the playing field. Adding your styles for font-size, etc onto the "parent" element (the container around your content, usually either a <div> or <td> in email) has given me the best results.

2. Copy pasting from MS Word isn't ideal for alot of reasons when it comes to WYSIWYG editors - believe it or not, the best of them will actually retain the styles you copied from another environment all together -- that's just not really ideal in this case since Microsoft "does their own thing" in terms of language and rules, specifically for fonts and that doesn't really work outside of MS Word. Here's where Google Chrome has saved me some headaches, in most browsers, when you right-click, you'll get an option for "paste" only. Chrome also gives you the option to "paste as plain text" which will strip all the extra bits that only make sense to Microsoft.

Bonus TIP in the WYSIWYG editor:

If you want to preserve the styles you've got setup on some content, say a headline that's above a paragraph, when working in the WYSIWYG editor, most people will highlight the entire line of text and try to replace it with text copied in from another application. If you're using chrome or another "paste as plain text" process, you can instead highlight everything except the first and last letters (strike-thru below) and paste into the "middle" of that bit of text to preserve the styles for that line.

Headline Here

Paragraph text here

If you were adding "NEW TEXT" it would look like this after you pasted your plain text into the headline

HNEW TEXTe

Paragraph text here

Then you can just delete the first and last letter and be sure that your styles are preserved. Working inside the "bookends" of the first/last letter is a 'more sure' way that you're not going to delete styles that are wrapped around that content and the only thing you'll be changing is the content itself. When it comes to buttons, especially, this is a good best-practice if you're not HTML-savvy.