I would like to be able to create my own personalized drag and drop email templates in the design manager.
So instead of starting to create new drag and drop templates from scratch each time and adjusting them to the CI guidelines OR cloning templates which I have created according to CI, I want to build the basic templates by using the design manager. This way, users can select from my company-specific templates when creating emails (rather than choosing the five templates provided by HubSpot) and they are still able to be creative and do their dragging and dropping, but with certain design limitations.
This functionality is essential for large companies in order to ensure that CI guidelines are being adhered to. If not implemented, the drag and drop is basically useless.
Also, simple cloining of drag and drop emails won't do the trick: Just think about the end of the year when the copyright date needs to be changed. This needs to be coordinated by using a global module (just like in the old Design Manager). That's just one of many exmaples where the new drag and drop reveals its weaknesses.
We released a feature last year where you can create a template in DnD editor and save for reuse. We are building a manage and edit function soon too which we hope to deliver iat the end of Q1.
We are working on a feature where you will be able to build DnD templates in design manager as you requested here but that will be released later in 2021. Sorry for initial confusion
@Shane_Janssens - I can see that the manage function has been devleoped but the edit function is not yet there for the DnD template. Is this still under devleopment?
Keeping this thread alive as this would be a great feature and very helpful to my team. @Shane_Janssens please let us know when there are any updates to this!
Actually, they HAVE done this. You can save Drag and Drop emails now as templates:
Just set up your email (make sure you set up all your fonts, background colors, link colors, etc) then under "Actions" at top, select "Save email as template" and it will save it under the templates. The next time you (or another member of your team) want to create an email, click "create email" then select the tempalte under "drag and drop" templates.
@ShariM Yup, it is possible clone a default Drag and Drop template, modify, and save it as your own template. Which is great for some use cases. But what would be even more powerful and useful would be the ability to code your own Drag and Drop email templates. Right now we have the ability to code email templates but are not allowed to use the Drag and Drop elements in those templates. I believe thats what most users in this thread are waiting for.
To be fair, email templates ARE complicated. As an email template designer and builder, I deal with the craziness of how complicated it is to create beautiful marketing templates every week.
Mainly due to Outlook, email html is 'the rocket science' of html templating. 😉
But the implementation at Hubspot is pretty gross. It's like everything at Hubspot is forward looking, while email template implementation and use for end users is stuck in 2009 or something. It's embarrassing really.
Agree with all the comments above. We're also running into issues as our users are cloning emails into the drag & drop template, which is overriding all of the work we've done with formatting and adding additional footers that are unncessary as they already exist in our template. Can we lock down the ability to clone emails into drag & drop?
HubSpot mangaged to make HTML emails worse! Have perfectly built templates. Tested all working in Litmus. As this needs to be a Drag and Drop template, the base Email template completly breaks your layout when you try to build it out.
Would quite like to see a vanilla DnD template that does not contain all the HubSpot bloat!
@NPeters I design and build html templates professionally. I spent about a day trying to figure out workarounds for the issues you have experienced and... it's just not worth it. I have mostly given up on HubSpot ever delivering a custom-template friendly environment. Which makes it worse than SFMC, Mailchimp, and pretty much any other bulk email sending tool on the planet.
It's an embarassment, truly, and I cannot recommend Hubspot for any company that puts a high value on brand consistency. Which for a marketing tool just makes me cry.
Hi - so while we understand the need for the padding - its tooooo much --- kinda takes away from the design completely -- May we pls request you to change that to half of the padding currently. REALLY hope you enable the change soon - THanks
The drag-and-drop feature is fantastic, but I would like the ability to change the width of the email. with the size of today's monitors a 600px email looks a bit ridiculous.
The inability to change the emails width is blocking us from using Hubspot for our emails as we want to display GIFs next to bulleted text. Right now the width is so tiny (600px) that there isn't a way to do this while still being able to tell what's going on in the GIF, so we've had to go back to outlook.
@SBernal2 I am an email html expert - 600 pixels is still the industry standard for emails. We do see more clients requesting wider templates but we often advice against going too wide, as the 600 pixels is perfect for scaling down on mobile devices and responsive emails. If the image doesn't work for you next to text at 600 pixels, imagine what happens on a mobile device.
I am assuming that you are using GIFs because you want them animated? If not, jpg is the preferred format for photos, png is preferred for illustrations and graphs. I recommend saving the files at double the display resolution to optimize image fidelity (so an image with a 300x150 display resolution would be stored at 600x300).