Marketo email template formatting issue when forwarded or reply to from outlook app | Community
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tanusrij
New Participant
October 10, 2023
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Marketo email template formatting issue when forwarded or reply to from outlook app

  • October 10, 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 7624 views

Hello!

I have an interesting issue, i am running into this formatting issue where when i am forwarding a Marketo email.

 

The email template has a two-column article design (Image on the right and Copy on the left) for both - the desktop and the same is the design for the mobile 9instead of for mobile we usually have the image on the top and the copy in below). The image is showing up twice on both desktop and mobile when I forward or reply to from my Outlook desktop app.

 

Has anyone experienced a similar issue?

Please share if anyone has a resolution.

Thanks,

Tanu

 

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Best answer by Dave_Roberts

I'll pile on here to agree with what everyone's said so far. 

 

The root of the issue here is most likely what happens to an email once it hits your inbox. Generally the way the email is coded for sending from Marketo to "inbox unknown" is that it has to be able to be received by all the different inboxes and interpreted as the same thing. This often means redundant code or funny little work-around the Outlook, Gmail, etc like to see in an email but other inboxes don't care about. Once the email hits a user's inbox, there's often a bunch of the code that gets "sanitized" from the original code b/c they all act like a bunch of spoiled children who don't want to share their toys and only accept code the way they want it and get rid of the rest. For this reason, the email that you forward IS NOT the same as the email you receive when sent from Marketo. 

 

Typically the solution here is to use the "Forward to a Friend" link which will send a net-new email from Marketo to the recipient rather than sending along the one you just got which has been "interpreted" by your Email Service Provider once it hit your inbox. 

4 replies

Dave_Roberts
Dave_RobertsAccepted solution
New Participant
October 11, 2023

I'll pile on here to agree with what everyone's said so far. 

 

The root of the issue here is most likely what happens to an email once it hits your inbox. Generally the way the email is coded for sending from Marketo to "inbox unknown" is that it has to be able to be received by all the different inboxes and interpreted as the same thing. This often means redundant code or funny little work-around the Outlook, Gmail, etc like to see in an email but other inboxes don't care about. Once the email hits a user's inbox, there's often a bunch of the code that gets "sanitized" from the original code b/c they all act like a bunch of spoiled children who don't want to share their toys and only accept code the way they want it and get rid of the rest. For this reason, the email that you forward IS NOT the same as the email you receive when sent from Marketo. 

 

Typically the solution here is to use the "Forward to a Friend" link which will send a net-new email from Marketo to the recipient rather than sending along the one you just got which has been "interpreted" by your Email Service Provider once it hit your inbox. 

    Jo_Pitts1
    Jo_Pitts1
    Community Manager
    October 12, 2023

    @dave_robertsm, nicely put.  However, far fewer people use forward to friend than their native email client forward functionality.

     

    I'd love to see @tanusrij's code to see what can be done about this.  Usually it is quite resolvable (not all formatting issues, but the double image one).

     

    Cheers

    Jo

     

    T
    tanusrijAuthor
    New Participant
    October 13, 2023
    Content backfill required
    Jo_Pitts1
    Jo_Pitts1
    Community Manager
    October 11, 2023

    @tanusrij , forwarding and replying to emails quite often causes problems as Outlook has a bad habit of stripping tags and styles.  Paste in the HTML for the email, and we can take a look.  Make the email as simple as possible (i.e. just the one element that is causing problems) so we don't have to wade through to much code

     

    Cheers

    Jo

      Danielle_Wong
      Danielle_Wong
      Community Manager
      October 10, 2023

      Do you have a light and dark mode version of the image? If so, you might want to remove the dark mode version of the image. I know that can cause duplication of images when the email is forwarded in outlook.

        Darshil_Shah1
        Darshil_Shah1
        Community Manager
        October 10, 2023

        Are you able to share the email's HTML? That will help to debug/troubleshoot.

         

        To give some background, forwarding emails is known to break the formats of your emails and in many cases cause duplication of the elements within your emails. This is ultimately caused by how the email clients reread and render the HTML code of emails. Outlook client is known to distort emails in particular. Overall, this behavior and experience is just something you’ll want to keep in mind and be aware of and isn’t something you can entirely control. One method I’ve seen in alleviating this behavior’s impact to an extent is including a web view link at the top of your emails. This way even when elements of the email are duplicated or become distorted after being forwarded, users can still access the web view link to see how the email is supposed to render as a last resort.

          T
          tanusrijAuthor
          New Participant
          October 13, 2023

          Hi, 

          I have shared the code below.

          Thanks,

          Tanu

          Darshil_Shah1
          Darshil_Shah1
          Community Manager
          October 13, 2023

          Thank you, @tanusrij! Could you please update it so it is in the code editor? @jo_pitts1posted an article on how to highlight the code on the nation earlier this week if you want to refer to it.

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