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Email template

An email template is reusable email structure and design — the layout, sections, and visual style you want to reuse across many emails, rather than the wording of any one message. Create a template when you want a consistent look for a recurring type of send, like a monthly newsletter or a standard promotional format. When you're ready to write the actual message that goes out, see Email — an email is one specific piece of copy, usually built from a template.

How to create one

Start a session and describe the layout and design you have in mind. Pulse's "New report" works well if you're starting from scratch and just have a general idea. If the template is for a specific campaign's recurring emails, that campaign's chat is a good place to start instead, since the assistant will already have relevant context about the campaign.

Describe the sections you want, roughly how they should be arranged, and any style preferences — colors, header/footer content, number of content blocks. See Using AI sessions for general tips on writing a good prompt.

What to include in your request

Four things change the result more than anything else, so say them if you have a preference — otherwise the assistant will pick or ask:

  • Layout — how many columns, and whether images are welcome. "One column, no images" is a very different template from the default.
  • Purpose — welcome, newsletter, promotional, follow-up, or transactional. (You can say something else and it's kept as you wrote it, but these are the ones the assistant recognises. transactional is the one that behaves differently: it's for genuine service mail like a receipt or a password reset, so no unsubscribe footer is added.)
  • Tone — friendly, warm, professional, enthusiastic.
  • Call to action — the button text and where it points.

Two more worth knowing: ask for plain text if you don't want an HTML design at all, and name any merge fields you want the template to leave room for, like {{ contact.first_name }} or {{ contact.company }}.

Merge fields vs. placeholders

These look similar and behave completely differently, so it's worth knowing which one you're looking at.

Merge fields — {{ contact.first_name }} — are filled in automatically, per recipient, when the email goes out. They only work for values stored on the contact record, so the list of what's available is exactly your contact fields (the ones you see on a contact, plus any custom fields you've added).

Placeholders — [[ PROMO_CODE ]], in double square brackets and capitals — are not filled in by anything. They're a marker the assistant leaves when you ask to personalise something that isn't a contact field: a promo code, an event date, a registration link. Nothing replaces them at send time, and there's no file or list you can upload to supply the values. Whatever is still in the template goes out exactly as written — every recipient would read the literal text [[ PROMO_CODE ]], in the body, the subject line and the preview line that shows in the inbox.

So treat a placeholder as a to-do. Open the template, click the pencil icon in the preview panel, and replace each one with the real value before you use the template for a send — or ask the assistant to do it ("replace [[ PROMO_CODE ]] with SPRING25"). If you need a genuinely different value for each recipient, it has to live on the contact record: add it as a custom field (see Custom fields), and then it can be a {{ }} merge field instead.

Example prompts

@[Name] below stands for an @-mention: type @ in the composer and pick the real template or saved file. See Pointing at your own data.

Quick

  • "create email template, plain text"

Fully specified

  • "Create a welcome email template for new subscribers. Tone: friendly. Layout: one-column. Purpose: marketing. Include a single CTA button: 'Get started'."
  • "create a new email template named 'Form auto-responder' that will be used to respond to a prospect who submitted a web form. The template layout should be 1 column and the CTA should call the prospect to contact our sales team."
  • "create an email template announcing that we're attending a conference next month. Layout: 1 column. CTA: register to attend, linking to our event page."
  • "Design a monthly newsletter template with a header, three content blocks, and a footer. One column, no images. Include the merge fields {{ contact.first_name }} and {{ contact.company }}."

Built on something you already have

  • "read these two blog posts [url] and [url] and create a new email template, 2-column layout, with a short summary of each article in its own box and a 'Read more' link for each. No images needed."
  • "create an email template that includes the information from @[Saved research file]. This is a newsletter with a 1-column layout."
  • "Take @[Template name] and build a new template for this campaign — keep the structure, but refresh the copy, audience and links." (To copy a template unchanged instead, use the Clone button in your Library — see Artifacts.)

What happens after you ask

If your request leaves something open — like which brand colors to use, or how many content sections you want — the assistant may ask a quick clarifying question first. Otherwise, it produces a full draft of the template's layout and design.

The template is never applied to a live send automatically. It lands in your Library as a draft, where you can review the design, ask for changes (different colors, a different number of sections, a different header style), or edit it yourself. Once you're happy with it, it's ready to reuse whenever you or the assistant draft an email — just mention the template you want, and the new email is built on that structure.

In the preview panel

Open the template to see its preview panel. Refresh re-renders the preview if you've made changes elsewhere in the session and want to see them reflected. Click the pencil icon to edit the layout and content directly — changes save automatically. Download HTML exports the template's markup, and Close exits the panel.

Above the preview itself are three view modes: Web (how it looks on a desktop screen), Mobile (a narrow-screen preview — worth checking, since most lists read mostly on phones), and Text (the plain-text version recipients see when their client won't render HTML).

Templates are built to render correctly on both desktop and mobile and across the common mail clients — including Outlook on Windows (which uses its own, much stricter rendering engine), Gmail (web and mobile apps), and Apple Mail. The design scales down to a phone screen without a horizontal scroll, images resize with the screen, and the layout doesn't depend on styling that a stricter client would strip. One visible difference you may notice: Outlook on Windows shows buttons with square corners instead of rounded ones — that's a known Outlook limitation, not a broken template.

FAQ

Q: What's the difference between a template and an email? A: A template is reusable structure and design — the shape an email takes. An email is one specific message with its own subject line and copy, often built from a template. See Email for more.

Q: Can I reuse the same template for multiple emails? A: Yes — that's the point. Once a template is saved in your Library, you can reuse it any time you ask for a new email that should follow that design.

Q: Can I change a template after I've already used it for an email? A: Yes. Editing a template doesn't change emails you've already sent — it only affects new emails you build from it going forward.

Q: Why did the assistant refuse a small edit I asked for? A: Most likely the edit would have removed the unsubscribe link. Marketing email has to carry a working one, so the assistant won't save a change that deletes it — it will say so and offer a narrower edit instead. This comes up most often when you ask to swap a URL and the assistant's find-and-replace would have caught the unsubscribe link too. Templates whose purpose is transactional have no unsubscribe footer to begin with, so this doesn't apply to them.