Email templates

A template is content you keep and reuse — your newsletter layout, your announcement format, the footer with your address in it.

Starting a campaign from a template means the parts that must always be there are always there.

A template holds the content of a message, and a campaign can start from one. Editing a campaign afterwards changes that campaign, not the template it came from.

Templates work with the same merge tags as campaigns, so a template can address people by name and fill in whatever custom fields you have defined. Give those fields defaults — a template used a hundred times will eventually meet a contact with a missing value.

The one thing worth building into every marketing template is the unsubscribe link. A campaign will not schedule without one, so putting it in the template means never being stopped by it at the point of sending.

1. Go to Templates and create one.
2. Name it for its use — Monthly newsletter, not Template 1.
3. Build the parts that never change: your header, your footer, your postal address if you send marketing, and the unsubscribe link.
4. Use merge tags for the parts that change per person, and confirm every tag you use has a matching contact field with a default.
5. Keep it simple. Heavy layouts break in some mail clients, and the plainer version usually performs better anyway.
6. Send yourself a test from a campaign using the template, and read it on a phone before you trust it.

A campaign will not schedule for want of an unsubscribe link. Add one to the template so it can never happen again.

Merge tags show as raw text in the delivered mail. The tag does not match a field. Check the exact spelling against your contact fields.

The layout falls apart in Outlook. Some clients support far less than a browser does. Simplify, and test rather than assume.

Editing a template did not change a campaign you already sent. Correct — a campaign takes a copy when it is created. Sent mail is never rewritten.

• Campaigns — where templates get used
• Contacts and lists — the fields behind merge tags
• Go to Templates