SMS Contains Pieces of Code

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

1. Copy the email content you’re planning to use.
2. Open Notepad (or any plain-text editor like TextEdit on Mac).
3. Paste the content into Notepad.
   

1. Copy the plain text from Notepad.
2. Paste the plain text into the SMS message field in your workflow or campaign.
3. 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.