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Composing a message with Proactive Support

How to format text, images, buttons and HTML in your message with Proactive Support

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

With Intercom’s Proactive Support tool, anyone can create personalised messages that look great, with speed, confidence, and ease. It’s quick to style your text, insert images, and easy to add a call-to-action - all with a few simple clicks.

Format your text

  • Format text by holding cmd + i for italics, or cmd + b for bold (Use ctrl for Windows).

  • You can add H1s, H2s, links, and more. Simply select a piece of text and the options will display.

  • To create a bulleted list, just type -, +, or * and then hit space.

  • To create a numbered list, type 1) or 1. and hit space.

  • Any URL you type will be automatically converted to a link after you hit space at the end of the URL.

URL encoding

Any links added to a message will be URL encoded.

For example, if a URL contains a space like this:

https://examply.com/help center

The space will be replaced with %20:

https://examply.com/help%20center

Avoid using already encoded links to prevent double encoding. 👌

Adding rich content like images/GIFs is easy. You can drag and drop them into your message, or add them using the + icon on the left of any content block.

You can also upload a video clip, embed a video, add a call-to-action button, apps, file attachments and more. 

Video clips must be in mp4 format and no more than 40mb in size. They'll display in a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Inline code and code blocks

To add inline code, type ` at the start and end of your code snippet. It will look like this:
example inline code 

To add a code block,  just type ``` at the start and end of your code snippet. Your finished code block will look like this:

example code block
example code block

Add HTML

  • Adding HTML is only possible when creating emails. You can't add custom HTML to in-app messages. You also can't use inline styling with the HTML option. To add it to your emails, just select the + icon on the left of your content block and select the "Insert HTML" option.

  • When you create a new custom email template, it doesn't contain a max-width rule for images. So when you add images in the composer, they aren't resized to fit like with a default email template. Adding the following to the template's code means that they are:

img { 
  max-width: 100%
}
  • You can also import your own HTML if you want to send emails using fully customized email templates. Just select the 'Edit HTML' option in the lower left corner of the email composer.

  • Adding attributes to your messages is easy. Just select the icon that appears on the right of any content block, and select the standard attribute, the custom attribute, or the event attribute that you would like to include in your message.

  • You can even add attributes to your links. For example, if you wanted to link each user to their company settings page, and the URL was www.yourappname/settings/, you can add to the URL from your list of attributes.

  • You can also add attributes to HTML blocks. To do this you must manually type the attribute syntax. Note: To include attributes with fallbacks within HTML attributes, e.g. href or src, please use single quotes for the fallback text as using double-quotes creates invalid HTML there

  • To create a new line within a content block, hit 'Return'.

  • You can create a new content block by hitting 'Return' twice.

  • To delete an image or a video, just highlight it and press backspace.

  • To delete a button delete all the text in it, and then press backspace once more.


💡Tip

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