Create and Manage Email Templates for Your Team

What are Email Templates?#

Email templates are reusable email designs your team can select when building a campaign. Instead of designing a new email from scratch every time, you save branded layouts — headers, footers, colour schemes, button styles — and reuse them across campaigns.

Templates are organised by category — for example Promotional, Welcome, Newsletter, Product Launch, Sales, Re-engagement, Festival, Seasonal, and Transactional — and your team can add custom categories too.

The prebuilt library#

AI Engage CRM ships with a prebuilt template library — professionally designed emails organised by category and season. Browse the library and clone any template to customise it for your brand. This is the fastest way to start — you get a polished design in seconds and only need to update the copy, images, and colours.

Step 1 — Open Email Templates#

Navigate to Settings → Email → Templates or click Templates in the marketing navigation. The template gallery shows all your saved templates alongside the prebuilt library.

Step 2 — Create a new template#

Click + Create New Template.

Fill in the template details:

• Name — internal name visible only to your team (e.g., Monthly Newsletter — Base Layout)

• Subject — default subject line for campaigns using this template (can be overridden per campaign)

• Description — optional note about when to use this template

• Category — pick from the available categories (e.g. Promotional, Newsletter, Sales, Seasonal, Transactional), or add your own

• Public template - Enable this option to make the template available to all users.

  

Step 3 — Design in the email editor#

After saving the details, the full drag-and-drop email editor opens.

The editor is powered by Stripo and gives you a complete design canvas:

• Blocks panel — drag in text blocks, images, buttons, dividers, social links, and more

  

• Structure — set the column layout (1, 2, or 3 columns) for each section
  

  

• Styles — control background colour, font, padding, and link colours globally.

  

• Desktop / Mobile preview — toggle between views to verify the design on both screen sizes

  

• Code editor — switch to raw HTML/CSS for precise control

  

Merge fields (personalisation shortcodes like {{contact.first_name}}) can be inserted anywhere in the email body to personalise with each recipient's data.

Managing templates#

From the template gallery, each template card has an action menu:

• Edit — reopen in the drag-and-drop editor

• Duplicate — clone the template as a starting point for a variation

• Archive — hide from the active gallery without deleting

• Delete — permanently remove the template
  

  

  
  

Personalize with merge tags#

Merge tags drop each recipient's own data into your email — their first name, city, company and more — so every message reads as if written for one person. A tag looks like {{contact.first_name}}: the module slug, a dot, then the field slug. At send time the CRM swaps it for that contact's value.

Insert a tag#

• In the email body — the editor has a built-in Merge Tags section in its sidebar. Click a field to drop it in; it appears as a highlighted chip.
• In the subject line — there's no picker here, so type the tag by hand, e.g. Hi {{contact.first_name}}!

The fields on offer come from the module you chose for the template. A "Viewing" scope switcher lets you reach one step away — a contact's company, for example ({{contacts.companies.name}}) — and a System group provides things like the current date and your organization name.

Show a fallback when a field is empty#

If a contact has no value for a field, the tag renders as nothing — it's removed, never left as raw {{…}} text. To show a default instead, add a pipe and a quoted fallback inside the tag:

{{contact.first_name|"there"}} → shows "there" when the first name is blank.

You type the fallback yourself — there's no separate "default value" box.