Turn Images into Email Templates in Seconds (No Coding Required)!

Ihargreaves

What if I told you that you could generate a brand-compliant email template in seconds by simply uploading a screenshot? Well, thanks to the latest release in both Marketo Engage and Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, Marketing Ops can do just that.

Creating and updating branded email templates has always been a critical part of the campaign creation process. Yet, for many marketers, this process has historically been time-consuming and resource-intensive, often requiring manual HTML coding or reliance on agencies and IT teams. These traditional methods not only slow down campaign execution but also consume valuable budget and resources.

The new Image to Template feature transforms the way Marketing Ops build email templates. Instead of spending hours coding or outsourcing, you can now convert design files, such as screenshots, into brand-compliant, editable HTML templates in seconds. No coding. No waiting. Just instant results.

With drag-and-drop simplicity and both JPEG & PNG file support, email template generation has never been easier. Picture this: your content team shares a design file for a new campaign email. Normally, you’d send it to IT or an agency and wait days for a coded template. With Image to Template, you simply upload the JPEG/PNG file, apply a Brand Theme (pre-defined design guidelines) and within seconds, you have a fully editable template ready in the new Marketo Engage email designer.

Why you’ll love it:

Drag-and-drop simplicity: intuitive UI for effortless usage

JPEG and PNG support: upload common image formats with ease

Speed and efficiency: generate templates in seconds, not days

Cost savings: eliminate reliance on agencies or IT teams

Brand-compliant templates: apply pre-defined brand design guidelines

To prove just how easy this feature is to use, we put it to the test by drawing a skeleton email on a scrap of paper and uploading a picture of it. The result? A very basic but functioning email template with image and text blocks, and buttons! See for yourself...

This feature is available to all Marketo Engage and Journey Optimizer B2B Edition customers inside the new email designer at no additional cost. Start turning designs into live campaigns today by checking out this demo video below.

This feature will be available from November 7th 2025.

cfitzpatrick-pb

Very cool feature! Looking forward to trying this out. Is there anything we need to do to enable this in our instance? I'm not seeing the "Convert Image to Template" button.

Dave_Roberts

Here's some screenshots from the video provided to "prove" how well the Image > HTML works.
The image on the left is the design file (input)

The image on the right is the HTML file (output)

Maybe it's just me, but I'm noticing that the two look nothing alike. I also notice that the top headline gets split into 2 different editable containers with large gaps between the text AND the 2 paragraphs of similar text in the design come out as different sizes with huge gaps between them in the HTML template.

The new Image to Template feature transforms the way Marketing Ops build email templates. Instead of spending hours coding or outsourcing, you can now convert design files, such as screenshots, into brand-compliant, editable HTML templates in seconds. No coding. No waiting. Just instant results.

If the intention is for this tool to save time and money in producing brand-compliant, editable HTML templates in seconds it's certainly not even close to anything I'd be comfortable calling "professional". Beyond the obvious issues in the screenshots above, don't forget that render-testing is an important part of email development and from what I've seen of the codebase for this Universal Editor, it's pretty sketchy under the hood. Also, don't forget that when you're working in the editor that "What-You-See-IS-NOT-What-You-Get" in terms of output. This is because of how the tool itself is built to render in things like normalize.css that certainly will not ship alongside your email to your audience's inbox -- said another way, there's extra code in the browser view that makes the editable canvas appear differently that is not included in the final product (output) of the editor tool.

>> USER BEWARE: Something like "Image > HTML" might sound too good to be true -- and that's because it still is, even with all the AI support and hard-working, smart and talented army of people working on putting something like this together... we're just not quite there yet. You're probably still going to need a developer to fix the issues you create by using this tool and as a developer I can tell you candidly that I'd much rather work on building reliable code in the first place than fixing unreliable code that came from some "Instant Noodle" vibes-based approach to coding.

Join the conversation here -- if you were to input the image on the left and output the image on the right, do you think that would actually help you compared to what you're doing today to produce emails in Marketo? How many folks out there are savvy enough to turn that image on the right back into the image on the left using the Universal Editor AND make sure that the code is solid and trustable when you send it off for render testing in Outlook and mobile devices?

Ihargreaves

@cfitzpatrick-pb you need to have completed the migration to the Adobe Identity Management system to access this feature - please reach out to your Adobe representative if this has not yet been completed.

Ihargreaves

@Dave_Roberts Thank you for sharing your detailed feedback, we appreciate your candid observations as they help us improve. You’re absolutely right that the current output isn’t intended to be a “ready-to-ship” email. The goal of the Image to Template feature is to create an editable template from a design image, not a finalised campaign. This gives marketers a strong starting point that’s already aligned with their brand theme styling (after applying design principles using the Brand Themes feature). From there, minimal manual edits - such as adjusting text or swapping images - can make the template deployment ready in minutes, rather than starting from scratch or outsourcing development.We see this as doing 90%+ of the heavy lifting, saving time, effort, and resources while maintaining brand compliance. We’re actively working towards more perfect iteraitions in future releases. Your points about render-testing and code reliability are valid, and we encourage users to continue applying their QA processes before sending.If you’d like, we can share a quick video showing how easily these templates can be refined for production. And if you have further suggestions or examples, we’d love to hear them as your expertise helps us get closer to that “perfect” outcome.

We will be happy to have a call with you should you want to see a demo of this!

Ihargreaves

@cfitzpatrick-pb please reach out to your Adobe representative as you will need to sign the GenAI terms and conditions to have this feature made available. Thanks!

Dave_Roberts

The goal of the Image to Template feature is to create an editable template from a design image, not a finalised campaign. This gives marketers a strong starting point that’s already aligned with their brand theme styling (after applying design principles using the Brand Themes feature).

If the goal is to create an editable template from a design, shouldn't the template that is produced match the design? If you look at the two images I've attached in my previous post, they're clearly only related in that the words are similar but the design is completely askew. This is far from a "strong" starting point, in fact, a better starting point for this particular example which was taken from the published demo would be to start with nothing and drag-and-drop a headline and a few paragraph Content pieces into the canvas. The Brand Themes feature may help to iron out some of the mistakes that the Image > HTML process creates, but certainly that's going to be limited to what the Image > HTML process produces in terms of output. For example, notice how the headline in the produced image is much bigger -- is that a <h1> or <h2>, etc? When the Brand Theme is applied to a <h1> it'll look different than the branded setting for an <h2> and it won't be right unless the Image > HTML does a better job or recognizing the sematic markup for each of the components. Also, have a look at the two paragraphs that are identical in styling in the first image, but much different in the second. Would the Brand Theme treat these as "Paragraph 1" and "Paragraph 2" instead of the same paragraph style (my guess is probably). Also -- why is that we can only make 3 paragraph styles, this seems really limited, but that's an issue with the Branding Themes not being as open as it should be to actually solve the branding problem for "all the companies" out there using this tool.

From there, minimal manual edits - such as adjusting text or swapping images - can make the template deployment ready in minutes, rather than starting from scratch or outsourcing development.We see this as doing 90%+ of the heavy lifting, saving time, effort, and resources while maintaining brand compliance.

It feels unrealistic to set the expectation that:

1) there are on minimal manual edits -- in the example from the published demo, just about every piece of content needs to be adjusted to get it to work (even with the Brand Theme being applied, see above)... that's a long ways from minimal and my concern is in how this information about the actual effort gets communicated out to the folks trying to learn how to use this new tool b/c it's still a long way from a professional-level tool in my experience and estimation. Further, in the example above from the demo, starting from scratch (assuming the Brand Themes were similarly preconfigured in both cases) would actually be a better starting point. I'd also argue that even outsourcing the design to any email professional in the world (even a not-so-good-one) would do better than this, but certainly a good email developer would be able to produce a much better, branded, deployment-ready (and future proof) asset by comparison.

2) it's doing 90%+ of the heavy lifting, saving time, effort, and resources while maintaining brand compliance -- I'm not sure where the 90%+ of heavy lifting, saving time, effort and resources figure comes from. This seems really arbitrary to measure (it sounds good though) and creates the expectation that the minutes it takes to do the Image > HTML process (lets call it 5 minutes to be generous or 300 seconds -- although it happened MUCH faster in the demo) is 90% of the work. That would mean the other 10% of the work would amount to 30 seconds of edits to make this brand compliant. I'd really love to see that be anywhere close to the truth. Beyond the scope of the time being overstated, I'd assume the "heavy lifting" refers to the development effort to create an email template by not using the new editor. If that's the case, you're really not going to end up saving that time b/c you're going to need developers to fix the issues that come up in render testing from using a process like this. In the net, that introduces more time and more cycles and more money and more effort than just getting the code right in the first place.

I joined my first Office Hours call today to try and help nudge this product in a better direction and I'll continue to be active in the community here to try and set clear expectations about the new email editor and offer suggestions and feedback as things come along. I appreciate you taking the time to address the concerns here and provide some feedback to take to the team who is working on this tool to hopefully make some improvements moving forward.

Overall, and nothing personal, the messaging around this new tool is nowhere close to the reality of it's capabilities under-the-hood. There's still a bunch of quirky and short-sighted code things going on, issues with the UI and UX and just generally a lack of consideration for what the email development process could look like if all the pain points were removed (which is a monumental task). This tool feels more like it's in it's middle-beta stages to me and I'm really concerned about all the messaging lately that it's "the next big thing that's ready to replace the old thing". To date - pound for pound, dollar for dollar, the legacy editor is still a superior choice and it's mostly b/c the new editor is so locked up (rather than open to development) and buggy that what you save in time up front ends up coming at a big cost down the road. On the scale of millions of emails a month or year, this is certainly a situation where you want to get it right the first time and not find out in hindsight that although things looked good on the surface, there were actually technical issues hidden under the hood. This just isn't a great way to advocate or champion the user's of Marketo, and I'd love to see more of that happening in lieu of spotlighting or championing "the latest thing" -- if this were really intended to be something that was designed to make folks lives easier, it probably wouldn't look like an integration of the AJO Universal Editor smashed into the Email Creation tool in Marketo. It might instead look more like an advancement of the already strong EM 2.0 editor and be done in a way where the preexisting assets would actually gracefully adapt into the new tool rather than being a "start over" point to use the shiny new thing.