How Link Styling Works in Your Newsletter

A link’s color and style — bold, italic, underlined — can come from three different places. Here’s how they stack up, and what to check when a link doesn’t look the way you expect.

The three layers

1. Your channel’s brand kit. Every channel has a default link color and default emphasis (its brand kit’s link style). A brand-new newsletter’s links start out using this default.

2. This newsletter’s own link style. In the composer, open the Styles tab, expand Text, and scroll to the Link section. Color and Style here set the default color and formatting (bold/italic/underline) for every link in this newsletter, regardless of what kind of block it’s in — a heading, a paragraph, a curated article, and so on. Change it here and every link in the newsletter that you haven’t individually restyled updates to match.

3. Formatting on one specific link. Select any linked text and the selection toolbar that appears lets you set a color, bold, italic, or underline just for that selection — overriding the newsletter’s link style for that one link only. When you first turn a piece of text into a link, it picks up the newsletter’s current link style automatically, unless you’d already applied your own formatting to that text.

So the most specific layer wins: an individually formatted link overrides the newsletter’s link style, which overrides the channel’s brand-kit default.

Why a link’s underline can look like a different color than its text

If you set a custom color on a link but don’t also explicitly set its underline formatting on that same selection, you may see the underline continue to show in the newsletter’s default link color while the link text itself shows your chosen color. If you want a link’s underline to match a color you’ve applied, set the color and the underline formatting together, on the same selection, rather than relying on the newsletter’s default to pick it up.

Why the composer and the delivered email can look slightly different

The composer is a working canvas for building your newsletter — it isn’t a pixel-for-pixel preview of the exact email your reader gets. The email your reader actually receives is assembled for delivery when the newsletter sends, so the composer’s canvas and the delivered email can differ slightly in how something like a link’s styling renders.

If a link doesn’t look right, use Preview or send yourself a test email before you schedule or publish, and check it against what you expect. If it still looks wrong in the delivered version, contact support so we can take a look.

Related

• How do I use the new design settings? for the rest of the composer’s Styles tab.
• Managing Brand Kits from a Central Company-Level Screen for your channel’s defaults.