Quick Tip: Customizing the Text of Existing Email Subscription Links

The ability to send effective marketing emails is one of the crucial features of the HubSpot Marketing tool. In those emails, it's important to include clear options for unsubscribing from your content.

Not only does this practice provide a convenient way for contacts to decide how they'd like to interact with your organization, but it also helps prevent contacts from unnecessarily marking your content as spam. (Oh, and also, it's the law.)

When building a new email template, it's easy to go with the default text for those links in the "Office Location Information" module. If you're looking to change those default links, it may seem that the only option is to remove the default links entirely and customize the text of the new links you add:

But what if you like the way your footer is styled, and you just want to replace the text? Read on for the surprisingly 5-step simple way to customize that text without having to remove the links first.

Step 1: Navigate to your email template

The first step in editing your email unsubscribe links will of course be to navigate to the template that you're looking to edit. It's important to note that the changes you make will only apply to that template and only to the emails that use that template.

Step 2: Edit the "Office Location Information" module

Once you're in the email template, click the gear icon on the "Office Location Information" module, and select "Edit options":

Step 3: Click the "source code" icon

Now that you're viewing the pop-up for editing your "Office Location Information" module, you'll be able to see the current position of your email unsubscribe links, as well as the text that those links are using. If you were to try to edit the text in the text field itself, you would only end up deleting the link.

Instead, you'll need to edit the source code of the module. To do so, click the "source code" icon in the menu bar:

Step 4: Edit the text in the source code

The resulting pop-up may seem daunting, especially if you are unfamiliar with code. However, once you learn a few quick tips, you'll be able to make the necessary changes to your content. The first thing to keep in mind is that links will be surrounded by this: "<a>...</a>"—anything between those two "tags" is linked text.

So, in the below screenshot, you'll see the two unsubscribe links highlighted. The code for the first link (to the contact's subscription preference page) is highlighted in red, with the link's text in green. The code for the second link (to the "unsubscribe from all" page) is highlighted in blue, with the link's text again in green:

By replacing the green-highlighted text, you're changing the text that contacts will click to get to those unsubscribe pages.

Step 5: Save, publish, and celebrate!

Now that you've made the changes you were looking to make, all that's left to do is to ensure that you save your changes and publish the updated template:

So there you have it: a way to change the text of the links without feeling like you have to start from scratch!

And the best part is that the same principles apply to customizing link text in page and blog editors. Now that you know how to identify a link in the source code, you can quickly update multiple links in your content.