Replace Six Templates with One Custom Module in HubSpot Email Templates

As many email and marketing automation managers know, email template flexibility and nice design don’t often go hand in hand.

This varying quantity of email modules is typically solved in one of two ways.

  1. Create six distinct templates for each quantity of featured elements.

    1. Template 1 = 1 featured element … Template 2 = 2 featured elements … on up to six.

  2. Create a single template and manually code the additional changes in a single rich text module within the email body.

Both of these solutions are perfectly fine and exactly how most businesses would solve the problem of flexibility + nice design. But that’s not the best way to build an email template.

The best way to solve this is with HubSpot custom modules.

We used HubSpot custom modules to build a flexible email template for publisher spotlights. Now our team can easily create an email that showcase anywhere from one to six publishers. Pretty cool.

Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Create a standard email template (the old fashioned way) with HubSpot designer.

Navigate to your HubSpot design manager and create your email template. You can design your email using the WYSIWYG editor, the same way you would any other email in HubSpot. This means adding modules and editing those modules to have the right CSS and images to create a nice looking template. Make it look like your “final” production template so that it looks exactly the way you want it to if you were to hit send today.

For this template, I started by building my template with sections (remember, I’m looking to have a template that can scale from one to six featured items). Below, I’ve outlined the code that’s included in each of the three primary sections of my email.

[Image Module] – This is the hero image at the top of the email.

— ! Module Group Start ! —

[Rich Text Module]

[Custom Module (Email Divider)]

[One Line of Text]

— !Module Group Start ! —

[Rich Text Module] | [Rich Text Module]

— ! Module Group End ! —

[Rich Text Module]

[Custom Module (Email Divider)]

[One Line of Text]

— !Module Group Start ! —

[Rich Text Module] | [Rich Text Module]

— ! Module Group End ! —

[Rich Text Module]

[Custom Module (Email Divider)]

[One Line of Text]

— !Module Group Start ! —

[Rich Text Module] | [Rich Text Module]

— ! Module Group End ! —

— ! Module Group End ! —

Does that make ZERO sense to you? That’s okay. Here’s a graphic to illustrate what it looks like in HubSpot.

HubSpot+Custom+Email+Template?format=original

Step 2: Clone the email template to a file (creating the raw HTML version of the template)

This will create an HTML version of your email template ready for you to strip out the elements of the email you need for a custom module. In my case, I needed to take the three spotlight sections in the example GIF and put them into a new custom module (Step 3).

Step 3: Create a custom module with a choice field.

Navigate to your design manager and create a new custom module. Name the choice field. In my case, I called it “Number of Pubs.” This will be used in step five to declare the IF statement for your future email template.

At this point, you’ll also want to determine how many choices someone using your template will have. For my example, I used six choices. Someone could choose one publisher or two, three, four, five, or six and the template will respond accordingly.

Step 4: Copy and paste the code from your HTML email into the body of the custom module

Go back to your newly cloned email (the one from step 2) and copy all the code you created. Make sure you grab all the stuff you want and nothing that you don’t. In my case, I grabbed the three table rows (<tr>) that made up my three spotlights.

If you want to see the entire thing, here’s a Google Doc that has all the code.

Step 5: Prepare IF/ELIF statements

If you’re not familiar with IF/ELIF (else if) statements, it might be good to checkout how they’re used in HubSpot design documentation or any other learning center like Udemy, or Codecademy. It’s pretty simple stuff, though — it basically just means “if x do y, else if xx do yy,” and so on.

The important thing is to remember that you have to tell the code when you’re done with the IF/ELIF statement by using { % endif % } at the end of your code.

Here’s what it looks like on my custom module:

IF ELIF CustomModule

Step 6: Copy your HTML sections into your IF/ELIF statements

You’ll now want to copy and paste your code however many times you need it to appear. For my template, I need to take the three table rows (<tr>’s) and repeat a set of three for every single one customer spotlight.

This means if I want to have two featured spotlights, I’ll need six <tr>’s to appear in the code. For three, I’ll need nine, etc.

step 7: Create a new email template with your new custom module

Now that you’ve created a custom module (l assume you’ve saved the module already), you need to create a new email template. It’s probably easiest to just clone the same template you started with — the one from the very beginning of the exercise — and just delete all the stuff you don’t need. You can then replace the stuff you deleted with your one simple custom module.

All this hard work paid off. Now, on the front end, we can have a single email template that lets anyone building a spotlight email choose between one and six number of spotlight customers to feature. This makes it easy for our team to create beautifully designed emails, fast.

NewCustomModuleEmailTemplate

About The Author — Mike Rizzo
mikedrizzo

Mike Rizzo, is the Community-led Founder of MO Pros and MarketingOps.com. With his extensive background in marketing Mike helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink's first-ever user community and Client Advisory Board programs. He is the founder of MO Pros - The Community for Marketing Operations Pros that is growing with an average of 110 new members every month. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast by MO Pros. As the founder of MarketingOps.com, Mike is taking a community-led approach to building resources that are purpose-built for MO Pros.

Related free workshops

The New Four Pillars of Marketing Operations

The New Four Pillars of Marketing Operations

Created with the assistance of DALL·E Introduction and Background In 2018, Edward Unthank introduced the four pillars of marketing operations, setting the stage for the management of effective marketing technology (Martech) functions. These pillars have since been the bedrock for many successful careers in marketing operations. My journey to redefine

Become a member
The Role of Front-End Martech Tools in the Age of Generative AI

The Role of Front-End Martech Tools in the Age of Generative AI

Introduction: Blending Human and Technical Perspectives in Martech Caption: Future gardens of martech will blend human and AI perspectives As a co-host of the Humans of Martech podcast, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the brightest minds in marketing technology. This unique experience has provided a blend of

Become a member