Introduction to Templates

When messaging your customers, do you find yourself rewriting content, rebuilding message layouts, and struggling to maintain consistency? With a library of templates, you can avoid these problems, reusing your content and editing it for each campaign when needed.

With templates, you can set up message layouts, styles, and content that you can customize and reuse in multiple campaigns and journeys.

You can build templates for each of the message mediums you use to communicate to your customers, while keeping the style, brand tone and voice, images, and links consistent.

This means that your customers experience your brand and messaging in a consistent, comprehensive way, and you can get campaigns up and running more efficiently.

This article describes templates, how they work, and how to use them in Iterable.

# In this article

# What are templates?

Templates are reusable blueprints for your messages. Use them to define content, styles, and layout that you can use across multiple campaigns, keeping your messaging trustworthy and on-brand. Templates can include:

• Plain text, HTML, and AMP for Email content
• Links
• Images
• User profile fields
• Data from campaign-triggering events
• Content from data feeds
• Catalog data
• Snippets
• Conditional logic

# For example...

Let's say your organization is having a special holiday sale. As the marketer, you design SMS, email, and push notification templates for the sale.

You enter the message text, along with any additional components like links, Handlebars, images, user profile fields, and more. Then, you save each template and select it when creating your SMS, email, and push campaigns.

You can then select that same template the next time you have a holiday sale, and edit the content to fit the required messaging for that sale.

Using templates across campaigns provides customized, consistent branding and language throughout your customers' experience with your sale.

# Types of templates

In Iterable, you can create five types of templates: email, in-app, push notification, SMS, and web push. To learn more about, check out these articles:

Check out these guides for each template type for more help and information!

• Creating Email Templates
• Creating In-App Templates
• Creating Push Templates
• Creating SMS Templates
• Creating Web Push Templates

# How templates work with campaigns

When you choose a template to use for a campaign, Iterable creates a copy of it specifically for your campaign. This way, you can edit the campaign's content without changing the original template.

Multiple campaigns can derive from and customize the same template without impacting each other, because each campaign gets its own copy of the original template's framework.

For example, a template for a seasonal sale might include message content, layout, and styles useful for promoting seasonal sales in general. Campaigns for specific seasonal sales throughout the year could then reuse that original template, modifying it each time as needed.

Maintaining a comprehensive set of templates helps you ensure consistency in content, style, tone and voice across all your campaigns.

# Finding and interacting with templates

In Iterable, there are three places you'll use and interact with templates:

• On the Content > Templates page. The templates here aren't associated with specific campaigns that you've already sent. Instead, they're templates you can choose when you're creating campaigns. To create a new template that appears on this page, click the New template button.

• In campaigns. When you're creating a campaign, you can choose a template to start with, and then customize it however you like. In fact, to get started setting up a new campaign, you can use a template you created on the Templates page, create a completely new template specificaly for this campaign, or use the already-customized content from another campaign. In any case, your campaign gets its own copy of the content you select and the template has its own unique ID, so you can customize it without affecting the original.

• In journeys. In a message tile in a journey, you can choose a template to use with the associated campaign. All of the template content behavior from campaigns (choosing a pre-existing template, creating a new one, or selecting content from a previous campaign) also applies at the journey level.

# Choosing a template editor

When you open an email or in-app template and click Design, you'll be asked to select a template editor. Each editor has different strengths:

• The Drag-and-Drop Editor suits beginner-level skills, with no HTML or CSS know-how required.

• The WYSIWYG Editor is the default editor, and is great for teams with intermediate HTML skill levels.

• The Side-by-Side allows you to enter your template HTML and CSS on one side, and see how it renders on the other. This editor requires more HTML and CSS experience, and is good to use with pre-built templates.

# Customizing templates

When sending messages to your users, make sure to provide relevant, personalized content. Iterable provides many different ways to do this:

# HTML, plain text, and AMP for Email

You can use HTML, plain text, and AMP for Email content with your messages.

# Catalog

Catalog stores information about your organization and projects right in Iterable. Then, you can use this data to personalize your campaigns at send time. For more information, check out Personalizing campaigns with Catalog.

# Handlebars

With Handlebars, your templates can display user profile fields and data from the events and API calls that trigger campaigns. Additionally, they can manipulate this data, format it, and use it to drive custom logic.

# Data feeds

Data feeds allow you to fetch user-specific data from external URLs (your own or third-party) and use it to personalize your messages. For example, a restaurant chain might use a data feed to fetch information about locations close to the user, and then highlight them in their messages. To tell the data feed which user you need information for, you can pass query parameters in the data feed URL.

To learn more, read:

• Our blog post on Data Feeds
• Personalizing Templates with Data Feeds

# Link parameters

Link parameters allow you to pass data along when users click the links in your email and SMS campaigns. For more info, read Link Parameters.

# Locales

Templates support multiple locales, allowing you to specify different content for different users, based on their locale preferences — without the need to create multiple templates.

To learn more about using locales, read Supporting Multiple Languages.

# Dynamic sender email addresses

Use dynamic sender email addresses to send from email addresses that individual users recognize. For example, you might use this option if your users have relationships with particular account managers, and would expect to receive email from them.

Check out Dynamic Sender Email Addresses for more info.

# Further reading

• Organizing Templates
• Working With Templates
• Introduction to Campaigns
• Introduction to Journeys