Spent 2 hours today investigating how to insert a table into an HTML email in ActiveCampaign's WYSIWYG editor such that it would have a non-responsive layout on mobile devices.

Raised a ticket and their official support said:

  1. ActiveCampaign only supports adding tables via custom HTML.
  2. Their support does not cover custom HTML.
  3. The best alternative way to add a table is to embed it as an image.

As it turns out, it's a problem with their WYSIWYG template: you can't turn responsive design off. I went into my old raw-HTML template, where I have full visibility and control of things, and got it done in 2 minutes.

Unfortunately, the "visual editor" and the "HTML editor" sides of ActiveCampaign can't talk to each other: you use one or the other, but you can't start something in the visual editor and then polish it up in the HTML editor.

  • Why I used the WYSIWYG editor at all: I had to set up the template so others in the team could send their own email campaigns, and never made the time to update my raw-HTML template after that.
  • I think we're getting to the point where software is being dumbed down too much — web apps are particularly bad. In fact, we may have been at that point for quite a few years now and I've just been too comfortable in my non-shared setup to notice. Power users lose out big time.