I am an email coder, I am not a CMS developer. I do have the paid version of Marketing Hub. I want to set up custom email templates in our Marketing Hub account, since the drag-and-drop builders lack some basic styling functions like mobile styles and image alt text styles, and there’s no access to edit the CSS or source code of emails.
Since I’m not a full-fledged CMS developer, I get lost trying to set up Design Manager. Most of the documentation is aimed specifically at website or landing page development, not email. Support doesn’t offer any developer help, so I’m desparately hoping someone here can help me set up the Design Manager and figure out how to create my own custom HTML email templates. Not landing pages, not a website, just email templates.
Can anyone help?
1. In the left side panel of the Design Manager click File and from the dropdown click New File…
2. In the popup that appears you’ll want HTML + HubL selected in the dropdown. Click Next
3. On the next screen in
Template Type dropdown select
Email, give your template a name, and click
Create
This will create a brand new email template for you with some basic markup to get you started.
Other than drag and drop and manipulating data you can pretty much use all the same HubL you would use in a website template. HubSpot usually points out in the documentation if a certain element is not usable in email.
You can see variables required in email templates here (for CAN-SPAM purposes):
And email specific variables here:
HubSpot also provides a responsive alternative to the basic markup provided and discusses a special style tag for compiling style blocks to inline here:
Thank you, Alyssa. As I said, I am not a website developer, and I don’t know what HubL is, but I have gotten the sample template per your recommendations and I’ll see if I can figure out how to turn that into a usable, branded email template in our Marketing Hub.
HubL is “HubSpot Markup Language”; it’s the syntax used to add dynamic content and make editable areas in templates. If you’re building email templates in HubSpot and want them to be editable it’d be a good idea to dig into the documentation and maybe even check out the HubSpot CMS for Developers academy course to learn a little bit about it. Even if they mostly discusses HubL in the terms of websites and landing pages a good portion of it will also apply to emails.
