Email Message Editor
How to write an email template: its subject, the email itself with details filled in for each customer, the header and footer, testing it and where it’s used.
Email templates hold the emails you send customers, so you write them once and choose them whenever you message customers. Open one from Settings > Document Templates with the pencil on its row, or with Edit email on its details page. A new one starts with Create Template, then Create from scratch and Email message.
The System Emails
Every business is given the emails Work Planner sends for you: the Price rise email, Payment link email, Direct Debit invite email and Invoice email, with the matching texts where there is one. Change their wording to suit you. They can’t be deleted, and Restore System version on the details page puts one back to how it started.
Writing the Email
- Subject: The subject line customers see in their inbox. To add a detail, such as the customer’s first name or a job’s due date, click in the subject and use Variables in the toolbar.
- The email: Write it as you would in the Simple editor, with headings, bold and italics, lists, links, pictures and tables. A new email starts with a greeting and a sign-off.
- Variables: In the toolbar, adds details such as First name or Business name where your cursor is, in the email or the subject, whichever you were last typing in. They go in written like {{first_name}}, as ordinary text you can format or move like the words around them, and are filled in with each customer’s own details when the email is sent. Format or delete the whole of one, curly brackets included: a variable with only part of it changed isn’t filled in. Emails about jobs also offer the job’s details, and invoice emails the invoice’s.
- Payment and Direct Debit links: When the email is sent, Work Planner makes each customer’s link through GoCardless, or sends the one they already have. A payment link asks for what the job owes. In the email the link can be clicked.
- Header and Footer: Header puts your logo and business details at the top. Footer puts your business name, phone number and email at the bottom, and is on when you start.
How It’s Sent
The email is sent in a standard email layout: a white column, centred on a light grey background, that reads well on phones and computers. Links and pictures work in customers’ email apps.
Preview and Test
- Preview & test: Shows the email as a customer gets it, subject and all, filled in with one of your own customers or jobs, or with example details.
- Email me a test: Sends that email to you, so you can see it in your own inbox.
Saving
- Drafts: Your changes save as a draft a couple of seconds after you stop typing. A draft isn’t sent to anyone until you save the email.
- Save & quit: Makes your email the one that’s sent, then takes you to the template’s details page.
- The menu: Version history lists earlier versions to go back to, Save as template keeps a copy under a new name, and Import and Export move an email between businesses or accounts.
Where Emails Are Used
- Message Customers: Choose an email under Email in the Message Customers Popup. You can change it there for one send without changing the template.
- Automations: An automation can send one of your emails instead of wording of its own. See Creating an Automation.
- Not printed: Email templates aren’t offered for printing or attaching, and can’t be a default.
Related articles
- Message Customers Popup: Sending your emails to customers.
- Text Message Editor: Writing the texts that go with them.
- Simple Editor: The same writing tools, for letters and documents.
- Preview & Test Popup: Checking a template before you use it.
- Email Settings: Who emails come from and where replies go.