Using Your Own HTML Code

If you choose the option to use your own HTML code in your communications, we assume that you, or your web designers, know a bit about HTML and that you want a little more control over your content. Consequently, TalkBox will do a few things differently than when you generate content using the drag and drop editor.

Generally speaking, TalkBox will change as little as possible of the HTML code you provide, but you should be aware of the following things. And as always, you should use TalkBox's preview mode and test email function to confirm that the content appears as desired before sending it to your customers.

Content Outside the HTML Body

Technically, almost all email clients these days are able to interpret HTML code, but many of them treat elements of code and styling information differently from one another. Consequently, when preparing your content for an email send, TalkBox may transform it to make it compatible with the widest possible range of email clients.

The major difference you may notice is that email clients generally don't expect to render a full HTML document with a head and body tag. Thus, TalkBox will not send emails as full HTML documents, but will extract any content which it finds in a body tag and send only that. In order to ensure formatting is consistent across email clients, it will enclose that content inside a series of "wrapper" elements.

Before the wrapper, TalkBox will place a style tag with some default styling to help the email display consistently. If your content includes style tags in the head of an HTML document, they will be copied into this style tag. If your content includes styles on or for the body tag, they too will be copied into the style tag and applied to the wrapper. If a background colour for the body is included, in a style tag, inline, or as a bgcolor attribute on the body, it will be applied to the wrapper.

Note: links to external stylesheets will be ignored - all styles must be inline.

Merge Fields

You can use standard TalkBox merge fields in your HTML code. Simply copy them into your code from the left hand panel visible in the HTML code editor.

Link Tracking

In order to track which of your customers clicked which links in your communications, TalkBox will change the URLs of all links so that they go to the original location via TalkBox.

Images

In order to ensure that images display correctly and consistently across clients, TalkBox normally copies all images into its own storage and changes image tags to point to these copies. It will not do so where you are using your own HTML code. thus, we leave it up to you to ensure that images in your supplied HTML code are accessible, correctly sized, etc. Please use preview mode and test email sends to ensure your images are as desired.

Standard Footer

A standard footer will be added to all your emails containing, among other things, the legally required unsubscribe link.

Minor Changes

Some of the HTML code may be slightly altered in order, e.g. to ensure that the character encoding can be interpreted consistently. This should not usually make any visible difference to the appearance of the content.

Script Elements

Script elements, such as Javascript, are not supported and will be stripped from the contents

Script elements in email are not supported by the vast majority of new email clients, are considered a security risk and will result in low delivery rates.