Email Editor line spacing

[Joey_Taralson]

Guys - am I the only one having line spacing issues with the email editor? I create an email and it renders correctly. Then when I preview or send myself a test, they are missing line breaks.

Today I created an email that rendered perfectly. I sent myself a test and it rendered perfectly. Then, when I sent the email (to 70 of my most important customers), it was missing a line break.

Here's the correctly formatted email (this was a test sent to my inbox):

Here's what was sent out (notice line break missing after #3:

Any advice? This is incredibly frustrating!

[Dayna_Wellman3]

Hi Joey,

Which email client are you using and do you know what your clients use? Emails render differently in each client, which could explain the difference. Bullet lists like what you have are usually a problem area. I recommend hard coding a break "<br>" in your HTML code for your email after the bullets and before the next paragraph and that should take care of it, but you'll want to test the email in multiple clients if possible. Litmus is a great tool where you can check how your email looks across multiple email clients and mobile devices.

I'm happy to help show you where to place the break if you post a screen shot of your code.

[Joey_Taralson]

Hi Dayna,

I get that, but I honestly don't think that is the issue (I'm fairly technical). I sent a test email to myself and viewed on Mac, Chrome (latest version), Gmail. It rendered perfectly. When I sent the actual email to my customers, I included a member of my team. He received the email on Mac, Chrome (latest version), Gmail, and it had the line break error. The email was put together with the "blank" template...I shouldn't have to edit HTML to ensure that when I hit return twice it renders a full line break. Nothing in the email in Marketo appears wrong. There are more of these emails set to go out this evening and I have no idea how to correct this error.

Second, we had so many issues with our email templates not inserting line breaks correctly (again, we're a team full of developers), that we finally threw up our hands and paid Marketo creative services to create a template for us. They did, and we still have line break errors, this time the errors are showing up in the preview and test emails but not in the email editor. See below:

Accurate spacing in editor:

Inaccurate rendering:

Again, Marketo created these templates! I have no idea what to do. Support can't seem to help me and my account rep directs me to support.

[Joey_Taralson]

PS: Thank you for your response! Hopefully I can get this figured out.

[Anonymous]

Hey Joey,

I think Dayna Lessig​ is spot on. I see you have 'Double Space' selected in your template...many email clients will strip out this code. Have you tried running it through Litmus?

[Dayna_Wellman3]

Yeah, it definitely sounds like there's something going on with the way the code is being built by Marketo. And I completely agree you shouldn't have to edit the HTML every time in order to get the layout to be how you want it. I'm a coder at heart and the Rich Text Editor drives me crazy because it doesn't do what I expect or want it to do. We build the majority of our emails in Dreamweaver then copy/paste the HTML code into the blank template in order to avoid some of the quirks of the Rich Text Editor.

I'm happy to help troubleshoot your code (like I said, coder at heart ) if you want to post the HTML here or email it to me in a text file: dayna.lessig@mheducation.com

[Anonymous]

Seconding this.

I can't tell you how many times I've looked at the source code for emails users have created in the "Blank" template and found that Marketo is often coding new lines as <div>s rather than <p>s -- which many clients will render without any margin (sometimes I'll even see a <div> followed by a bunch of </ br></ br> tags.  It's no fun to have to double-check the HTML if you're setting up the email in the WUSIWYG, but if you know what you're looking for, it'll save you some heartburn down the road.

[Joe_Reitz]

you can change the <div>/<p> biz in Admin > Email > Edit Text Editor Settings

[Joey_Taralson]

I have this as <div> for both. I'm believe that's how I should have it set up. No?

[Anonymous]

You may have some custom CSS in your templates that overrides this, but by default many clients will render a <div> element without any top (or bottom) margin, while a <p> will create a new paragraph with the proper margin/spacing -- which could be one cause of your line break issue.

Obviously what you choose as the root block element depends on your specific use case, but in my experience the best thing to do for general email templates (particularly templates that are primarily designed for text, like your example) would be defaulting to <p> -- but I'd be curious to hear what others are doing here.