Clear Styles in Your Campaign

Content you paste into your emails and landing pages from an outside source, like a website or word processor, can apply extra HTML code that alters your layout or restricts your ability to make changes.

The Clear Styles tool in Mailchimp's editor toolbar helps remove extra style code from your content after you've pasted it into your layout. Open the source code for your text to remove additional code the Clear Styles tool can't remove.

In this article, you'll learn more about the Clear Styles tool and how to delete extra HTML code from your emails and landing pages that Clear Styles can't remove.

How Clear Styles works

The Clear Styles tool removes style code from your text's HTML code such as bold, italics, and color. While you may want these styles applied to your text, the styles you paste from websites and word processors can display incorrectly in email clients.

Clear Styles is designed to remove style code, and can't remove code like <p> and <div> tags. You’ll need to access the source code to manually remove these from your text.

Use the Clear Styles tool

We recommend you type and style your content directly into the new or classic builder. Mailchimp's editor is designed to create HTML content that works with most email clients.

However, if you've created content outside of your account and have already added it to your email or landing page, use Clear Styles to remove extra style code. Then, apply styles to your text again in the builder.

Clear styles in the new builder

To use Clear Styles in the new builder, follow these steps.

1. In the Content section of the builder, click Edit Design or Resolve.
2. Highlight the text you want to work with, and click the Clear styles icon.
   

If your layout looks good, add new styles to your text with Mailchimp's editing tools.

Clear styles in the classic builder

To use Clear Styles in the classic builder, follow these steps.

1. In the Content section of the builder, click Edit Design or Resolve.
2. On the Design step, click to edit the content block you want to work with.
   
3. Highlight the text in the side panel, then click Clear Styles.
   
4. Click Save & Close.

If your layout looks good, add new styles to your text with Mailchimp's editing tools. It's important to follow our suggested style hierarchy when you apply styles to your text, so the style settings in one area don't override the styles in another section.

If you still notice problems with your layout, take a look at the source code to find additional code that the Clear Styles tool couldn’t remove.

View and remove extra code

You can delete additional HTML code that Clear Styles couldn't remove. You'll find this extra code using the source code of the text, because it isn't visible in the visual designer.

View and remove extra code in the new builder

To view and remove extra code using the source code in the new builder, follow these steps.

1. In the Content section of the builder, click Edit Design or Resolve.
2. Highlight the text you want to work with.
3. Click the Code tab.
   

4. Find the extra code and delete it. Tags contain an opening and closing tag, so if you delete a <p> tag, also find and delete the </p> tag. This is an example with some highlighted HTML code you should delete.
   

   Common Tags to Delete
   <p> </p> <div> </div>

   Common Characters to Replace
   &nbsp; replace with a space
   &rsquo; replace with an apostrophe (')
   &rdquo; replace with an apostrophe (')
   &quot; replace with quotation marks (")

View and remove extra code in the classic builder

To view and remove extra code using the source code in the classic builder, follow these steps.

1. In the Content section of the Campaign Builder, click Edit Design or Resolve.
2. On the Design step, click to edit the content block you want to work with.
   

3. Click the < > Source icon.
   
   Find the extra code and delete it. Tags contain an opening and closing tag, so if you delete a <p> tag, also find and delete the </p> tag. This is an example with some highlighted HTML code you should delete.
   
   Common Tags to Delete
   <p> </p> <div> </div>

   Common Characters to Replace
   &nbsp; replace with a space
   &rsquo; replace with an apostrophe (')
   &rdquo; replace with an apostrophe (')
   &quot; replace with quotation marks (")

4. Click Save & Close.

After the extra HTML code is removed, you can add styles to your text with Mailchimp's styling tools. It's important to follow our suggested style hierarchy when you apply styles to your text, so the style settings in one area don't override the styles in another section.