Email Designer: How to write Right to Left (RTL) text in campaigns

With ActiveCampaign, you can use the Right to Left (RTL) option with the Email Designer (launched in 2022). Doing so lets you create and send emails to customers who speak Arabic, Hebru, or Udu.

Take note

• RTL properties apply to text only, including text in buttons
• To write text right to left on banners, you need to turn the RTL option on before you write text on banners
• Punctuation marks, including dots and exclamation marks, that you put at the end of the line, will start at the RTL line
• We do not mirror images
• We do not reverse numbers
• When using links with RTL enabled, the link starts with a slash (/). Links will be read by all browsers and email clients correctly even if English (Or any left to right language) is set as the default in a browser
• We do not mirror the flow of email columns so your email design remains the way you built it

How to write RTL text in direct and automated campaigns

1. Create or open an email that uses the Email Designer. 
2. Click the “Global Settings” tab that appears on the right pane of the designer.
3. Under “General Settings, activate the “RTL” option.

Things to consider when optimizing emails for RTL

Numerals

Numerals are always read left to right no matter what language they are written in.

If you add a country calling code, be sure to omit spaces and any punctuation marks like dashes and brackets in it. Otherwise, your phone number will not be correct.

(Phone number, LTR)

(Phone number, RTL with brackets)

(Phone number, RTL without brackets)

Images
Do not mirror images that do not show direction, like product photos.

Instead, do reverse progress bars (images of them), the play buttons, and star ratings:

In RTL emails, icons go to the right from the texts:

Fonts and line spacing

The languages that use the RTL script are normally somewhat italic. It means we should avoid the Italic type for our emails in Arabic, Urdu, and Hebrew.

The letters are higher than Latin letters. So it’s advisable to increase the line spacing when adding RTL texts to emails.

With ActiveCampaign, you can set line spacing just once for the entire email.

Underlining

Do not underline RTL text.

If you want to highlight a piece of text, you may overline it. But out of email accessibility reasons, we strongly recommend that you do none of the above. Instead, you can play with colors or make the necessary piece of text bold.