Dynamic Table of Contents

[BMelville]

Is there a straightforward way to add a clickable 'Table of Contents' to email that will jump to each respective section when clicked?

[BMelville]

Thanks everyone for your insights! This is extremely helpful.

[Jnix284 · Accepted solution]

Hi @BMelville, as @PamCotton suggested you could use anchor links in the email to create the table of contents - however, Gmail for iOS, Apple Mail for iOS and Outlook for Mac don't support anchor links.

Anchor links have also been known to trigger spam filters because of the additional HTML needed within the email.

This is a step-by-step guide to create a table of contents with anchor links for marketing emails.

I'd be interested in learning more about your use case for a table of contents in your email to see if there's a better solution.

For example, if your emails are so long that you need table of contents, that would be a good opportunity to leverage a Knowledge Base with shorter articles/answers that can be linked to from within the email. If it's very in-depth info on a single topic, a blog article might be a better solution.

[BMelville]

Hi Jennifer, thank you for the additional insight. This is for an email going out to contacts who've registered for our annual conference. It's a 'Know Before You Go' email that addresses several areas related to the conference with helpful information for registrants (Travel, Lodging, Wifi, Dining, etc). Due to the length of copy, I was thinking a table of contents would help the reader more easily navigate to different sections. However, I don't think it's worth the risk to include anchor tags from a deliverability and user experience perspective. Thank you for your help!

[Jnix284]

You're welcome @BMelville happy to help, I think using visual cues (like different background colors to clearly delineate each section) will make it easier for them to scroll to the corresponding section or stop them if they're skimming to note important information.

[PamCotton]

Hey @BMelville thank you for posting in our Community!

You can create anchor links for each section in your email. An anchor link is a hyperlink that points to a specific location within the same email. You can create these by adding unique IDs to each section in your email. Once you have created the anchor links, you can create a Table of Contents section at the beginning or wherever you prefer in your email. 

This table should list the sections along with hyperlinks that point to the respective anchor links.

To our top experts, @Jnix284, @RatulRahman @trevordjones any recommendations for @BMelville?

Thank you,

Pam

[trevordjones]

Hi @BMelville ,

@Jnix284 and @PamCotton  have covered this topic pretty well, but I'm with Jennifer on the use case.  There may be better ways to deliver this content.