Email Not Displaying Correctly in Gmail: Fix Custom Font Fallback Overrides for ActiveCampaign for Retail & Consumer Brand Campaigns
Retail campaigns rely on high-fidelity visual assets, coupon borders, and clear promotional layouts. Default image blocking or button collapses disrupt the visual journey. Below is the targeted integration guide to fix Custom Font Fallback Overrides inside Gmail Web (Desktop) templates when using ActiveCampaign.
Technical Breakdown
Gmail Web (Desktop) uses the Goog/WebKit Layout Engine which lacks support for standard rendering rules. This causes Custom Font Fallback Overrides elements to break or collapse when rendering templates.
ActiveCampaign Behaviors
ActiveCampaign's editor parses HTML template imports and automatically cleans inline attributes, which can break VML tags. Always use absolute styles and avoid relying on classes. Always define ALT descriptions for retail product shots, and base64-encode your brand logo so the email headers render cleanly even when images are blocked.
Remediation Code Block
To prevent Outlook's Times New Roman fallback override, wrap your custom font declarations inside an @media block that Outlook ignores, or use MSO conditional statements to override font-families specifically for Microsoft Word rendering engines. In your ActiveCampaign campaign manager, make sure you configure your links to run via %UNSUBSCRIBELINK%.
<!--[if mso]>
<style type="text/css">
body, table, td { font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; }
</style>
<![endif]-->
<style>
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Montserrat&display=swap');
</style>Live Code Sandbox Test
How to Deploy inside ActiveCampaign
Copy the fixed VML or table wrapper code block from the remediation box above.
Insert an 'HTML block' from the layout builder panels. Avoid standard text boxes, as the ActiveCampaign parser might strip conditional MSO comment strings on saving.