CTA retina display support

[mitchellkp]

HubSpot automatically compresses images, CTAs - either custom image or the out of the box Hubspot stylings -- do not look crisp, clear and high-res on retina displays.

Add support for retina and otherwise address the image quality loss in CTAs.

[mitchellkp]

Hi HubSpot Community,

My name is Dom and I’m a Product Manager at Hubspot. I’m really interested in finding out how folks are currently using CTAs, what’s working, what’s not working and what new functionality you’d like to see in the future. Please DM me if you’re interested in a quick 30 min chat with myself and the team. 

Best,

Dom

[mitchellkp]

Interesting, thanks for confirming @jhachquet. That sounds like a good plan, we'll be in touch with support on our side and get to the bottom of what you're seeing. Thanks again!

[mitchellkp]

Hi @jhachquet, @mitchellkp, @AnastasiaSG, @Annie_B, looping back on this, this is indeed a brand new feature, but I should have mentioned in the original post that it's part of the new CTA app specifically, not available in the legacy version. All  customers should have the ability to move to the new editor since Feb 20th via a message in the bottom-right of the old CTA app, but if you're seeing any issues with that definitely let me know. (Some more info on the new app can be found here). 

Some details on what actually changed here, previously even if you uploaded a 2x image into CTAs (let's say a 200x200px image for a 100x100px CTA) the moment that the CTA was sized to it's final dimensions (100x100px) the original image would then be resized down to 100x100px too. This is what made things so fuzzy. With this update to the CTA rendering engine, if an image is uploaded at 200x200px for a 100x100px CTA, we store the original size, and made a second copy of it at 100x100px and serve both versions with the CTA when it's rendered on your site and in email. We take advantage of a HTML attribute called srcset which allows us to provide two separate URLs for two different images, one at 100x100px and another at 200x200px and then the browser/device picks which one it's going to use to load the image depending on the pixel density of the screen it's loading on. This scrset attribute works for both websites and most major email clients so it should kick in across the board. 

This also works for button-based CTAs (the out of the box CTAs) when used inside emails too. When building a button-based CTA, it's turned into an image to be used in the email, and provided at a 1x, 2x, 3x and 4x resolution in the mail to be sure it shows up as crisp as possible. A note on buttons in emails though, right now button CTAs show up in emails as images, this is due to a limitation on the options to render standard HTML in email clients, a lot of HTML isn't supported so the only way we can be sure it'll look correct is by turning it into an image. We're actively looking into creating a way for customers to build proper HTML buttons for emails that are built using email-safe HTML and at that point buttons will always render as HTML and never require an email, but in the meantime these buttons are also rendering as retina-supported images, no work needed from you, that part's automatic. 

I hope this helps shine a little light on it, if there's anything I can clarify or if you have any follow up quesitons definitely let me know.

[mitchellkp]

Hi all, this update to CTAs is now available to everyone. To learn a little more about how it works and to try it out, check out the top section of our guide here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/cta-user-guide-v2/how-to-create-a-call-to-action-cta-with-a-custom-image

Thanks!

[mitchellkp]

Hi all, some really good news here, after a substantial amount of research and work to rebuild CTAs we now have a beta of a re-implemented image rendering for CTAs that supports retina optimisation right out of the box. We'll be rolling this out to all customers over the course of the next few weeks. Stay tuned 

[Shay]

Interesting, thanks for confirming @jhachquet. That sounds like a good plan, we'll be in touch with support on our side and get to the bottom of what you're seeing. Thanks again!

[Szed]

I use the new CTA tools, 

but it still look very bad ... It's not the size i uploaded it.

Same in the email 😐

[AnastasiaSG]

Thanks Shay for the precisions. Do you have any updates about the button-based CTAs ? As many of our client are still complaining about this retina-resolution-issue... 

[ojobson]

Yes - an update on text / button CTAs created via the CTA tool are needed. I don't think this has been marked as delivered until then. Do we need to submit a seperate 'idea' to cover that?

[Annie_B]

Agreed, this doesn't seem to be solved and continues to be a problem for us. 

[jakeb]

I think an acceptable fix would be for the button image to be rendered as twice the size in an image that is half the width/height.

For example, if the button is 150x40px, then the CTA's image would be 300x80px. That way when the image is embedded onto the page/email, the image would have twice the amount of pixels available, and therefore look sharp on a high-DPI display. The HTML would appear as follows:

<a href="{{ cta.url }}">
    <img src="{{ cta.image }}" width="150" height="40" alt="{{ cta.label }}">
</a>

[ojobson]

Ok - I've raised a new idea here and incorporated the feedback on this thread.

Please can you go and upvote it if you are interested in seeing this feature be developed and implemented in HubSpot properly.

[robinsonjn22]

 Hubspot - 

This has not been delivered. Please implement a solution where CTAs are not pixelated on mobile email.

[BryZ]

Image and CTA quality is unacceptable. Makes us look bad. How can we send blurry emails to promote our impecible design services? In my opinion this is a deal breaker and we will be looking at other marketing automation platforms.

[jakeb]

@BryZ what we're doing is simply manually creating CTAs using images and CSS. Not only did we get sick of waiting, we found that HubSpot CTAs didn't help us in any shape or form. 

In our experience, they just complicated things. If we wanted to track clicks, then we can just track clicks within the landing page and email reports. If we want to A/B test CTAs, then we just A/B test our emails. Also, by centralizing CTAs, it limits how well you can tailor the CTA to the context of the entire email / landing page; and if you have a team, you may run into issues where CTAs are getting updated or duplicated without considering that there are existing emails/landing pages which have dependencies. Links are trivial to create, so it just feels like a useless product in the grand scheme of things.

If you want to use images, simply upload your image to HubSpot's file system, and insert it with a "?noresize" parameter appended to the end of the image URL. This will prevent HubSpot from resizing the image during post-processing and you'll end up with a crisp high-DPI image.

It definitely a disappointment that HubSpot can't just insert 2x images, but I'd imagine there's some level of backwards compatibility which is blocking them from executing on it. So here we are.

[BryZ]

I got an email with a reply from user @jakeb but the post is gone. 

Jake, I am with you completely. Another thing I found is that the ?noresize image DOES NOT WORK. It makes images appear better in the builder, but once you send the email the images are compressed regardless. I did multiple tests as this is the soltuion their support team kept offering me. Can someone confirm that I am correcting in stating that ?noresize does not work like they claim?

We just signed up for HubSpot, and are going through the integration phase now. I am on the verge of walking away. We offer design and development services to our customes, and sending blurry emails does not reflect well on us and makes us look sloppy. I see people have been asking for a soltuion for over a year now.

Another super frustrating thing is when I initially asked their support why the images and CTAs were blurry they told me it was due to things on my end such as image size, quality, resizing (as in setting a 1000px image to 175px), etc. They gave me the run-around for a few days until I proved all their theories wrong, and only then did they finally state it was actually a known "feature/bug" (that is what the support person called it). What a huge waste of my time.....

[Kanefire]

After requesting this over a year ago, I have decided to move on. Hubspot charges too much to have critical components languish. I utilize both marketing and sales CRMs and have been frustrated time and again...

[PaulaClapon]

Hi guys,

Does anyone have an update on this? I've even tried using the ?noresize hack for an image CTA and it still doesn't work.

[ojobson]

@PaulaClapon @Kanefire @BryZ @AnastasiaSG

Since HubSpot marked this as delivered, I started another thread here - please upvote and maybe we can finally get this sorted once and for all!

[mrspabs]

Why is this marked as delivered? The CTAs still look blurry

[ojobson]

 @mrspabs - see the post above yours!

[mrspabs]

 @ojobson it says "The idea you are trying to access is not available." when i click it

[ojobson]

@mrspabs That's odd - full URL is: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/CTA-Retina-Display-Support-Attempt-2/idi-p/188364

I can access it when I am logged in, but not from a browser where I am not logged in...

[GChris]

This needs to be re-opened. Pretty basic stuff you'd think.

[benvanlooy]

There is no work around that helps.

I'm not just talking bout the CTA, I'm talking about every image in the email.

A few of our clients of have the Hubspot starter account. We cannot edit html, so we cannot use the ?noresize trick.

We are forced to use the Hubspot Module interface with the drag & drop. No matter what we do, we keep getting bad quality images because of the compression.

Support now has basically told me there is nothing they can do do change this.

I  suggest that Hubspot adds an option per email to turn of the compression so we have more control.

One of our clients understandibly is not happy with the quality & therefor we have decided to now send out emails with campaign monitor... Kinda defeats the purpose of using Hubspot really..