Templates

A template is a saved email layout you can start new campaigns from. This page covers starting from a prebuilt template, saving your own, and deciding when a template is worth creating rather than copying an old campaign.

Templates live under Templates.

Starting from a prebuilt template#

IGSendMail ships with template layouts you can use as a starting point. Pick one whose structure matches what you are sending, a single-column announcement, a newsletter with several sections, a promotion built around one call to action, then replace the content and the styling with yours.

Treat a prebuilt template as a skeleton, not a finished design. Before you send anything built on one, check the footer. Placeholder company names, addresses and social links are the most common thing people forget to change, and they go out looking exactly as careless as they are.

Saving your own template#

Once you have an email whose layout you want again, save it as a template and give it a name that describes the layout rather than the campaign it came from. Newsletter, two column tells the next person what they are picking. September send v3 final does not.

Strip a template down before you save it. A good template holds:

• The header, with your logo and its link.
• The overall styling: background color, body width, font stack, heading sizes, link and button colors.
• The block structure of the layout, with placeholder text in it.
• The complete footer, including the unsubscribe link, your postal address and any legal text you are required to include.

A good template does not hold last month's headline, a dated offer, or a link to a campaign-specific landing page. Every one of those will eventually be sent again by somebody in a hurry.

Template or copy an old campaign?#

Both give you a starting point, so the question is which one you want to be maintaining.

Copy an old campaign when the send is a one-off variation, when it is essentially the same email with new content, or when you send it a handful of times a year. Copying is faster and there is nothing new to maintain.

Make a template when any of these are true:

• More than one person builds campaigns.
• You send the same shape of email on a schedule, weekly or monthly.
• The layout has rules that are easy to get wrong, for example a required disclaimer or a fixed footer.
• You are about to change your branding and want the change to land in one place.

The failure mode with copying is drift. Somebody copies last month's send, tweaks a color, and the month after that somebody copies the tweaked one. Six months later you have four subtly different versions of your email and nobody knows which is correct. A template gives you one answer.

Keeping a team consistent#

If several people build campaigns, the template is where your brand rules live. A few practices that keep it that way:

Keep the number of templates small. Three or four templates covering your real send types beat twenty near-duplicates. When people cannot tell which template to pick, they copy an old campaign instead, and you are back to drift.

Name templates by purpose. Monthly newsletter, Product announcement, Event invitation. The name should answer "which one do I use for this?" without anyone having to open them.

Put the colors and fonts in the template, not in a document. A brand guideline nobody opens does not affect the emails that go out. The template does.

Decide who edits templates. Editing a template changes the starting point for everyone's future campaigns. It is worth agreeing that one or two people make those changes rather than everyone editing in place.

Retire templates you have replaced. An outdated template that stays visible will get used. If you have replaced a layout, delete or rename the old one so it is obviously not the current choice.

What a template does and does not carry#

A template holds layout and content. Recipients, sender identity, subject line and send time belong to the campaign, and you set them each time you build one. That is deliberate: a template that remembered a list would eventually send something to the wrong list.

Editing a template does not change campaigns that were already built from it. A campaign takes a copy of the template's content at the moment you create it, so a fix to the template applies from the next campaign onward. If you have already scheduled a campaign and then fix the template, go and fix the scheduled campaign too.

If something goes wrong#

The template looks different from the campaign it came from. Check whether the original campaign carried inline styles that were pasted in rather than set through the editor. Pasted styling can survive in one place and not another. Rebuild the affected block using the editor's own controls.

Personalization tags in the template render empty. The tag is fine, the fallback is missing. Add a fallback to any tag you put in a template, because a template will eventually be used on a list where that field is not filled in. See Personalization tags.

Somebody sent placeholder text. Add a visible marker to placeholder copy in your templates, for example REPLACE THIS, in a color that is impossible to miss. Placeholder text that reads like plausible English is placeholder text that gets sent.