If you or your clients are seeing SMS messages filled with strange HTML code like <div>, <span>, or other formatting tags, this guide will show you exactly why it happens and how to fix it in under a minute.
What’s Happening?
This issue usually occurs when someone copies the content from an email and pastes it into an SMS message field within a trigger, campaign, or workflow.
Why is that a problem?
Emails are built with HTML formatting (like bold text, links, images, etc.). When pasted into an SMS, this formatting doesn’t get removed — and instead of a nice-looking message, the recipient gets a jumbled mess of code.
An SMS that looks like
How to Fix It (In Under 1 Minute)
Follow these steps to clean up your SMS message:
Step-by-step Checklist
- Copy the email content you’re planning to use.
- Open Notepad (or any plain-text editor like TextEdit on Mac).
- Paste the content into Notepad.
This strips out all the HTML formatting.
- Copy the plain text from Notepad.
- Paste the plain text into the SMS message field in your workflow or campaign.
- Save your changes and run a test SMS to make sure it’s clean.
Pro Tip: SMS messages support plain text only. Always preview and test your SMS steps, especially if you’re reusing content from another channel like email or social posts.