Text Rich token displaying html in Text Version of Email - Partial Workaround

[Kelci_Martinsen]

Hey Marketo Community,

I'm fairly new to Marketo and I recently had a problem with rich text tokens displaying correctly correctly in the text version of an email.

Context - I have created a template for a webinar program that uses 11 tokens to populate a variety of fields throughout the different stages of the program. This program will be used for approximately 45 webinars this year and because our team doesn't have every single one of these webinars planned down to the detail, the majority of the tokens I used are rich-text tokens to provide flexibility for unknown content.

Problem - However, I was experiencing a problem with rich text tokens displaying html in the text version of an email. Being fairly new to Marketo, I searched the Marketo docs and the forum looking for a solution. I came across a couple discussions that were helpful ---> Text version of emails not token-friendly

The main solution provided was to create a separate text token that would be used in the text version of the email. Unfortunately, this would double the amount of tokens used in my program. Alternatively, although the content currently being used in the rich text token did not require styling, I did not want to change all of these tokens over to text (to maintain adaptability for the future).

Solution - I found I was able to edit the html of my tokens in the rich text editor. By editing the html of my tokens, I was able to get rid of unused <span> styling as well as the random <br> here or there. The attachment "click to edit" shows how to access the html source editor as well as the plain text I thought would show when the token was rendered. The attachment "html source editor" shows the actual html that would render in the text version of the email (minus the <p></p>).

Note - this is only useful if there is html/styling that you won't use when rendering the token in the html version of the email.

This isn't a huge revelation in the world of Marketo but it took longer than I thought it would for me to find it in the documentation and forums, so I thought I would share in the hopes that I could cut down on someone else's search time!

Again, a warning this is only useful if you are using a rich-text token that doesn't require html/styling. If you need the html for your token in the html then best way is to create a separate text token for the test version of the email.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Can you please replace those attachments by inline images (you can paste images directly into the post/reply box)? Not all users of the Community can view attachments so it can be very confusing.

Sounds like if you really have "a Rich Text token that doesn't require HTML" then the only thing you're gaining by using a Rich Text over a Text token is line breaks. Most people would use a Text token to start off with in that case. (I understand you didn't want to change your existing tokens over.)

By the way, by using a Velocity token instead of a Rich Text token you can have it output HTML tags on the HTML side, and Text only (no tags) on the Text side. This is called a "polymorphic token" and I wrote a blog post about it a couple of years ago.