How to use Draftship with HubSpot CRM (Sales Hub)
Build polished one-to-one sales templates in Draftship, paste them into HubSpot Sales Templates, and send from your connected Gmail or Outlook with personalization tokens that resolve at send time.
HubSpot's Sales Hub uses Sales Templates for one-to-one rep emails: composed in the CRM, sent through the rep's connected Gmail or Outlook mailbox, tracked back into HubSpot for opens and clicks. The rendering surface is the recipient's email client, not HubSpot's marketing pipeline. That means Outlook fidelity matters, and Draftship's bulletproof export pays off.
Where HubSpot CRM accepts pasted HTML
Open the HubSpot CRM, go to Conversations → Templates (or Sales → Templates depending on plan). Click New Template. The composer opens. Click the <> Source button to switch to HTML source mode. Paste your Draftship export.
The rep composing the email picks the template, the tokens resolve against the open contact record, and the email sends from the rep's mailbox. HubSpot logs the activity on the contact's timeline.
Personalization tokens
Sales Templates use the same HubL tokens as Marketing Hub, but resolved against the active contact (or deal, or company) at the moment the rep clicks Send.
| Draftship | HubSpot CRM |
|---|---|
{{ first_name }} | {{ contact.firstname }} |
{{ last_name }} | {{ contact.lastname }} |
{{ email }} | {{ contact.email }} |
{{ company }} | {{ contact.company }} (or {{ company.name }}) |
| Owner first name | {{ owner.firstname }} |
| Default fallback | {{ contact.firstname or "there" }} |
The composer warns the rep about unresolved tokens before send, so missing values are visible in the UI.
What HubSpot's composer does to your HTML
The Sales composer is a rich text editor. When you paste through Source mode, the markup survives, but a few things to know:
- The composer adds wrapping
<p>tags around bare text nodes after save. Wrap your Draftship paragraphs in explicit tags before paste. - The composer can re-encode some characters. Curly quotes and special whitespace sometimes get mangled. Use straight quotes in Draftship.
- Outbound rendering depends on the rep's mailbox (Gmail's compose pipeline, Outlook's compose pipeline). Some bulletproof tricks that survive marketing sends get re-flowed by Gmail's compose.
Sequences vs Templates
A Template is a one-shot reusable email. A Sequence is a multi-step cadence (Day 1, Day 3, Day 7) that auto-sends or drafts each step. Both can use Draftship-built HTML.
For Sequences, paste your Draftship export into each step's template. The Sequence engine handles the cadence and the unsubscribe/auto-pause logic.
Test send checklist
- Send a draft to your own email through the CRM composer to validate token resolution.
- Open in both Gmail and Outlook to confirm rendering after the rep's mailbox passes through.
- Run the size checker on the rendered output.
- Verify the contact-record link tracking is enabled in template settings.
When to use HubSpot's drag-drop in Templates
For non-technical reps who want to swap a hero image, use HubSpot's Lightning-style template editor (drag-drop). For high-stakes outbound where rendering matters, the Source mode path with Draftship gives you control.
For more on rendering quirks at the mailbox level, see Outlook-safe email buttons.