# Email templates

Source: https://gokarla.io/docs/guides/notify/email-flows

# Email templates

Email templates are the emails Karla sends to your customers on your behalf —
order updates, delivery issues, resolve confirmations — written and owned by
you. In the [Karla Portal](https://portal.gokarla.io), go to
**Notify → Email templates**.

A template on its own doesn't send anything. Karla sends it when something
triggers it:

- **[Automations](/docs/guides/notify/automations)** — pick a shipment,
  return, or claim event and a template, and Karla sends it automatically.
  No other tool needed.
- **The Send Karla email action in
  [Shopify Flow](/docs/platform/email-templates#set-it-up-in-shopify-flow)** —
  send a template from your own Shopify Flow workflows.

:::note Templates, integrations, or custom triggers?
Karla Notify has a few distinct pieces. **Email templates** (this page) are
the content of emails Karla itself sends, and
[automations](/docs/guides/notify/automations) decide when they go out. The
[Notify integrations](/docs/guides/notify/integrations/klaviyo) forward
shipment events to an external email tool (Klaviyo, Brevo, …) that sends its
own emails. [Custom triggers](/docs/guides/notify/custom-triggers) are
time-based signals delivered to Klaviyo as metrics — they don't send emails
themselves.
:::

## Availability and roles

Sending emails through Karla is a premium add-on. Until it's enabled for your
shop, the page shows a **Karla email sending** banner with a **Premium**
badge — you can browse your templates, the catalog, and previews, but not
create or send anything. Use the **Contact us** button to get it enabled.

What you can do on the page depends on your portal role:

| Role   | What you can do                                                    |
| ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| viewer | Browse templates, the templates catalog, and previews              |
| editor | Create, edit, activate, and test-send templates                    |
| admin  | Everything above, plus delete templates and change sender settings |

## The three tabs

| Tab                   | What it's for                                                         |
| --------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Your templates**    | The templates your shop owns — activate, test, edit, and delete them  |
| **Templates catalog** | Ready-made templates to clone into your shop                          |
| **Settings**          | Sender settings, and the custom sending domain on the enterprise tier |

## Start from the catalog

The **Templates catalog** tab lists ready-made templates grouped into
**Order update emails** and **Resolve emails**, so you never start from a
blank page.

- **Preview** opens the template in a side panel; templates that exist in
  several languages show one tab per language.
- **Use template** clones the template into **Your templates** — a toast
  confirms it was added. Multi-language templates show **Choose language**
  instead: pick the language in the preview and confirm with
  **Use template in EN** (or the language you chose).

:::note The Automatic badge
Some catalog cards carry an **Automatic** badge. It's a category hint derived
from the template's tags — it doesn't schedule or send anything by itself. A
template only goes out when an
[automation](/docs/guides/notify/automations) or the **Send Karla email**
action in [Shopify Flow](/docs/platform/email-templates) sends it.
:::

## Edit your template

New templates open in the **block builder**; templates cloned from the
catalog open in the raw HTML editor, since they ship as full HTML documents.
The block builder shows a live preview next to these fields:

| Field                       | What it does                                                                                          |
| --------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Email title**             | The template's name in your list                                                                      |
| **Tags**                    | Freeform labels for organizing and filtering your templates                                           |
| **Enable email automation** | Whether the template is active — same as the **Active** switch in the list                            |
| **Language**                | The template's language. Multi-language templates aren't supported yet, and it can't be changed later |
| **Subject**                 | The email subject line                                                                                |
| **Email preview**           | The preheader text inboxes show next to the subject                                                   |
| **Upload Email hero**       | The hero image at the top of the email                                                                |

The body is assembled from **Text**, **Image**, and **Spacer** blocks that
you can reorder and remove. Text blocks offer White, Light gray, and Gray
backgrounds; spacers range from 8 to 48 px. The footer's logo, colour, and
content are configurable as well. Save with **Save and create** for a new
template, or **Save changes** when editing.

## Personalize with variables

Write variables with double braces — `{{ variable }}` — and Karla fills in
the value per customer and shipment at send time. The editor lists every
available variable as a clickable chip, grouped into **Shipment variables**,
**Resolve variables**, **Customer variables**, and **Other variables**; click
a chip to insert it into the focused field.

- Substitution is plain token replacement — no conditionals, loops, or
  filters.
- Unknown variables — and known variables the send has no value for — render
  as an **empty string**, so a stray token never leaks into a customer email.
- Values are HTML-escaped automatically.
- Append `_urlencoded` to any variable name (like
  `{{ order_number_urlencoded }}`) to insert its URL-encoded value for use
  inside links.

The full variable list, and which events populate which value, lives in the
[email templates reference](/docs/platform/email-templates).

## Activate and test

On **Your templates**, each template has an **Active** switch. Only active
templates can be sent — by an [automation](/docs/guides/notify/automations)
or by the **Send Karla email** action in
[Shopify Flow](/docs/platform/email-templates) — and only active templates
can receive a test email. Deactivating a template that an automation uses
pauses that automation's emails until you activate it again.

To sanity-check a template, click its **Send test email** action (for
inactive templates the button is disabled with the hint "Activate the
template to send a test email"). Enter a **Recipient** — the field is
prefilled with your own email address — and click **Send test**. The test
email fills all variables with sample values, and a toast confirms it was
queued.

## Manage your templates

The **Your templates** table shows each template's **Name**, **Language**,
**Tags**, and **Active** state. **Create new template** starts a fresh
template in the block builder. Deleting a template is admin-only and
permanent — the confirmation dialog warns that the template will be
permanently deleted.

- **Search** — the **Search templates...** box filters by name, tag, or
  language. Once you have more than 20 templates, the list is split into
  pages (20, 50, or 100 per page) and search only covers the current page;
  click **Search all templates** to load all your templates on one page and
  search across them.
- **100-template limit** — a shop can have up to 100 email templates. When
  you reach it, the page shows a **100-template limit reached** warning, and
  **Create new template** and **Use template** are disabled until you delete
  one.

## Sender settings

The **Settings** tab shows whether Karla email sending is **Enabled** for
your shop, and lets shop admins adjust how sent emails present themselves:

| Setting                 | Default               | What it does                                      |
| ----------------------- | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- |
| **Replies sent to**     | `no-reply@gokarla.io` | The reply-to address, e.g. `support@yourshop.com` |
| **Sender display name** | Your shop's name      | The sender name customers see in their inbox      |

Click **Save sender settings** to apply the changes (admin only). The
settings apply to every email Karla sends from your templates, including
automation emails.

On the enterprise email tier you can go further and send from your own
domain — see
[Send from your own domain](/docs/guides/notify/sender-domain).