Content Builder is one of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s newest tools for creating emails. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve covered some questions that may arise when you are considering switching from Classic Content to Content Builder, as well as some key differences between the two tools.
Catch up with part 1 and part 2 of our Content Builder series.
Many of our clients rely on the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) within Classic Content, so we’ve compiled a list of our favorite improvements to the Content Builder WYSWIG. Overall, the Content Builder WYSIWYG has some distinct improvements over the Classic Content WYSIWYG.
Scalable Images
In Classic Content, updating images using the WYSIWYG would cause the height and width to be hardcoded. The alteration of the code tended to break the responsive nature of some emails. Praise the email gods because the Content Builder WYSIWYG allows for images set to a width of 100 percent and a height of auto. Though, we do recommend that the images be imported at the max size they should appear in the email.
Paste as Plain Text or Paste from Microsoft Word
Content Builder gets rid of the unnecessary Microsoft code in its WYSIWYG, making it easier to paste content.
In Classic Content, we almost always had to paste content from Microsoft Word into a text editor before pasting into the SFMC WYSIWYG. If we didn’t, Microsoft-specific, superfluous code would end up in the WYSIWYG, causing rendering issues. In Content Builder, the WYSIWYG has a few features to make this easier. Along with the standard paste function, we have “Paste as Plain Text” and “Paste from Microsoft Word.” Both of these features bring up a separate dialog box, which effectively removes the extra formatting and code.
Improvements to HTML Editor
Content Builder’s HTML Editor includes line numbers, is color-coded, and elements autocomplete and highlight.
For those of us who are familiar with editing HTML within the Marketing Cloud, Content Builder has welcome additions. The HTML Editor includes line numbers, the HTML is color-coded, and as of the October 2016 release, HTML elements autocomplete and highlight, making it much easier to edit HTML within the platform.
Mobile Preview
The Content Builder WYSIWYG also includes improvements to displaying mobile rendering within the platform. Although Classic Content has a mobile view, it isn’t always reliable. Content Builder not only has a preview width, but it’s users can modify the width of the WYSIWYG and preview panel, allowing the user to see how content areas will function, respond, and scale within a template.
The Content Builder WYSIWYG has a much more reliable mobile view than Classic Content.
Spell Check
Powered by WebSpellChecker.net, the Content Builder WYSIWYG has a much more powerful spell-check tool than its Classic Content counterpart. Users can enable the WYSIWYG to Spell Check as You Type (SCAYT) and can even spell-check in 16 languages. However, the spell check feature is only available in the Content tab within a content block, not the HTML Editor. So, it only checks the spelling and grammar of live HTML text, but does not check the spelling of alt or title tags.
Next week, we’ll go over some improvements to Content Builder we hope to see in future SFMC releases.
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