Dynamics 365 Marketing (Customer Insights) has a great drag and drop editor, which is simple to use and produces great looking emails. However, sometimes, you may want to send out simple text based messages which are more like ones made in an email editor such as Outlook.
Why send plain text emails?
- Can help with deliverability
- Can avoid spam traps
- More likely to be read by users
To make your plain text email
In Dynamics 365 Marketing (Customer Insights), select the Marketing Emails menu item and click new. Click Skip when asked to choose a template
Click the HTML button when the editor appears.
Look for this line of code below and delete it. This deactivates the drag and drop editor. Now is a good time to save the page. You should notice the drag and drop items disappear.
If you’re confident with HTML and CSS, you can now delete all the HTML you don’t need. However you’ll see that Dynamics Marketing (Customer Insights) will always re-add basic HTML markup to make the page valid HTML. It will also prompt you to add this line of code if you’ve removed it <meta name=”referrer” content=”never”>
Microsoft’s reference of tags and attributes is a useful guide
You’ll see some global settings listed. You can change these if you like
Your changes should update these values below after you save, if they don’t then you can update the style settings manually or you can change fonts and colour using the toolbar later.
Scroll down through the code and look for this.
Select all the code downwards after the <body> tag until you come to the closing </body> tag, and delete it all.
You can now start to compose your email using the menu to add formatting etc.
The add image button is hidden in the 3 dots menu
Don’t forget, if this is a commercial email, you’ll need to add a link to your subscription centre and show your address
Notes:
- You can save this email as a template
- You can still add dynamic elements like a subscription centre link
- The email is still technically HTML, so it’s not a true plain text email
- Make sure you test the email and use the litmus service the first time you try this
