Owlat Docs

Email Templates

Reusable email designs that define the structure, content, and personalization of every campaign and transactional message you send in Owlat.

Templates are the foundation of every email you send in Owlat. They define the structure, content, and design of your messages — and you can reuse them across multiple campaigns and automations.

Types of templates

Owlat has two distinct template types, each designed for a different use case:

Marketing templates

Found in Mail > Marketing, these are for campaigns and automations. Marketing templates are typically rich, designed emails like newsletters, product announcements, or promotional offers.

  • Used with campaigns and automation email steps
  • Full access to the visual Email Editor
  • Can be used as variants in campaign A/B tests
  • Can include Translations for multi-language sends

Transactional templates

Found in Mail > Transactional, these are for triggered, one-to-one emails sent through the API — things like password resets, order confirmations, or welcome emails.

  • Sent programmatically via the API using a slug identifier
  • Support dynamic variables for personalization
  • Typically simpler in design with a focus on content delivery

See Transactional Emails for the full guide.

Creating a template

  1. Open Mail > Marketing (or Mail > Transactional).
  2. Click New Marketing Template (or New Transactional Email). For marketing templates, this opens a starter library — pick Start from Blank for an empty canvas, or begin from a pre-built preset (Welcome Email, Newsletter, Announcement, Product Update, or Plain Text).
  3. Enter a name for your template.
  4. Build your email using the Email Editor.
  5. Save when you're done.

Name your templates descriptively — "March 2025 Product Newsletter" is much more useful than "Newsletter v2" when you're searching through dozens of templates later.

Template states

Templates go through two states:

  • Draft — work in progress.
  • Published — marked as reviewed and ready to send.

Publishing a template signals that it's been reviewed and is ready to send, and you can unpublish a template to return it to draft if you need to make changes. The state is advisory: both draft and published marketing templates currently appear in the campaign template picker, so the status is a workflow signal for your team rather than a hard send gate.

Working with templates

Duplicating

Need a variation of an existing template? Duplicate it to create a copy with all the same content and styling. This is especially useful for:

  • Creating A/B test variants with different subject lines or content
  • Building seasonal variations of a recurring email
  • Starting a new template from a proven layout

Using in campaigns

When you create a campaign, you'll select a marketing template in the content step. The template's content becomes the body of your campaign email. See Campaigns & Reporting for the full workflow.

Using in automations

Automation email steps reference a template. When the automation triggers, the template content is sent to the matching contact. See Automations for details.

Personalization

Templates support dynamic variables that are replaced with contact-specific data at send time. Insert variables by typing {{ (or @) in any text block — a picker appears with the available variables. Variables are stored as {{name}} tokens and resolved per contact when the email is sent.

Common variables include:

  • Contact fields like first name and last name
  • Custom Contact Properties you've defined
  • System variables like unsubscribe links

Supply a per-variable default with the inline fallback syntax {{firstName|'there'}} — if the contact has no value for firstName (or it's empty or null), the fallback text is used instead. Without a fallback, an unresolved variable is replaced with an empty string, so consider fallbacks for variable-heavy sections.

Next steps

Next AI Assistant