Are you building repetitive emails and struggling to brand them consistently at the expense of valuable time? Don't! Email has become the de facto standard for corporate communication and done much to improve written correspondence, but it's time to catapult productivity to yet greater heights! How?

By setting up canned email templates, the best solution to expedite common announcements and responses and keep your team on-brand. 🙌

➜ What's the advantage of creating and using shared email templates?

➜ Where can I use shared email templates?

➜ Where are shared email templates stored?

➜ How do I edit, duplicate or delete an existing shared email template?

➜ How can I create a new shared email template?

➜ How do I design an email template from scratch?

➜ How can I test and preview my shared email template before sending and why should I do it?

➜ Why do emails created from templates look different in Outlook?

➜ How do I discover where in Full Fabric a shared email template is currently in use?

The advantages of using custom ready-made email templates are many:

What's not to love? 😍

Shared email templates can be used in one-to-one emails, campaigns, and any kind of automated workflow. These different areas don't all work exactly the same though.
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Campaigns and one-to-one emails both give you the flexibility to copy and edit the templates, allowing you to make minor changes that aren't applied to the originals:

The same cannot be said for automation workflows, as with them you can only pull the desired template and send it as is:

Shared email templates are housed in a dedicated page – a digital library, if you will. To access it, just click the gear at the top right-hand corner and choose Shared email templates:

Here's an example of a library of shared email templates:

Shared email templates are publicly available to all members of staff (hence the "shared" part). 🙃 That said, you can apply filters to limit the number of items displayed to the ones you really need. Results can be narrowed by team and by individual team member:

Furthermore, the interface includes a search bar that allows you to quickly find templates by name or subject:

Rest assured, even if you accumulate hundreds of shared email templates, the page remains fast thanks to pagination. 😃

To open and edit an existing shared email template, simply click on its name:

To duplicate or delete a template, click the vertical ellipsis at the end of the row and select Duplicate template or Delete template, respectively:

If the option Delete template is disabled, it means that the template in question is currently being used somewhere in the system, namely in an automated workflow, a drafted one-to-one email or a planned campaign:

Once the pending campaign or the drafted one-to-one email is dispatched, the template is freed up for deletion; likewise if you use the Copy & edit template function. For automated workflows, the only way is to dissociate the email template from the task(s) that it's linked to. As long as the template is not actively in use, it's deletable, for previously sent emails have no bearing on shared email templates. To discover where in Full Fabric a shared email template is presently in use, click here.

Once inside the Shared email templates page:
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​     1) On the top right-hand corner, click the button Create a new email template
     2) Define a Name (for internal reference only) and a Default subject
​     3) Press Create template to continue

You'll be automatically taken to the tab Details, where, at any moment, you may alter the Name and the Default subject of the email template:

To design an email message, jump to the tab Editor. 🎨

The Editor tab contains a modular email builder to craft beautiful and sophisticated emails with very little effort. Learn all about this exciting feature here. 👈

You shouldn't declare your template finished before properly proofreading it, which includes:

The respective buttons are to be found under both the Details and Editor tabs:

For more information, please come here.

Please click here to read about this topic.

If you want to delete a shared email template but cannot, or there's any other reason why it would be helpful to track where a shared email template is currently in use, you'll be pleased to know that there's a special page where such information is available. 😁

To access it, just open the shared email template whose usage you wish to trace and click the tab Advanced, which in turn will redirect you to the tab Usage:

The column TYPE, as its name implies, describes the type of operation that the email template is involved in: Automation, Email, or Campaign.

The column Description provides more detail, specifying whether it's a Form, an Event, an Unconditional offer, an Application template, a Lifecycle workflow group, an individual class (in which the name of the programme and of the class are displayed; for example, MSc in Intellectual Property Law Class of 2025), the name of the campaign (for example, Welcome to the Meet & Greet 2023), or the subject, sender and recipient of the one-to-one email.

The gear at the end of the row is a shortcut to the place in question:

As explained earlier, the Copy & edit template function converts shared email templates into single-use templates, so if it was used for a campaign or one-to-one email, that campaign or one-to-one email will not appear in the aforementioned list.

You have reached the end of this article. Thanks for reading! 🤓 If you have any questions or comments on the topic at hand, or if you enjoy reads like this and have article requests, feel free to start a chat or email us at support@fullfabric.com. Also, please leave a rating below. Your feedback is highly appreciated! 💖

PUBLISHED: March 9, 2019
LAST UPDATED: December 30, 2022 at 8:55 p.m.