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Email templates & branding

The Templates tab under Marketing holds your reusable email designs, and Marketing → Settings → Template branding holds the store-wide look they all inherit. The two work together but do different jobs:

  • A template is a saved design — a body layout plus optional subject and preview-text defaults. It has no audience and no schedule; it exists to be the starting point for marketing emails and automation emails.
  • Branding is a single store-level object — logo, store name, font, six brand colors, and footer identity. It is never baked into a design. The renderer layers it on live, at render time, so a brand edit restyles every preview, every thumbnail, and every future send of every email — automations included.

Whenever you start a new email, the Start your email picker opens first: a category nav on the left, a design grid on the right, with a Blank email card always in first position. Every thumbnail renders with your live branding and your store’s real products, so the gallery already looks like your email program, not a stock catalog.

Campaign starters

One-off emails draw from five categories of first-party starters:

CategoryDesigns
AnnouncementsNew product launch, new collection drop, coming-soon teaser, back-in-stock restock
Holidays and occasionsBlack Friday / Cyber Monday, holiday gift guide, seasonal sale, birthday celebration
NewslettersMonthly newsletter, weekly roundup, behind the scenes, tips & community
Product highlightsFeatured product spotlight, bestsellers grid, product comparison, how-to-use
PromotionsPercentage-off sale, free-shipping offer, flash sale with countdown, win-back offer

Product sections in these starters are dynamic: they’re wired to your best-selling products, so the design populates with your actual catalog automatically — nothing to swap out before sending. Picking a starter also seeds the email’s subject and preview text with sensible defaults, which you can rewrite in the builder.

Automation starters

Each automation gets its own starters, shown only when you design an email for that automation — a campaign picker never shows them, and an abandoned-cart picker never shows generic campaign designs. Automation starters lead with the matching trigger section (the abandoned cart, the recovered checkout, the price-dropped product), then supporting copy and a call to action, often followed by a best-sellers grid.

Saving your own templates

Any design you like can become a template. There are two ways in:

  1. From the email builder — while designing any email, open the ⋯ menu and choose Save as template. Name it, and the current design is saved as a reusable copy. The email you were editing is unaffected.

  2. From the Templates tab — select New template, name it, and design from scratch in the full builder.

Saved templates appear in the picker under Your templates, alongside the starter categories. Picking one seeds the new email with the template’s design plus its subject and preview-text defaults.

Each email built from a template gets its own copy of the design. Editing or deleting the template later never touches emails already built from it — and editing an email never changes the template it came from.

On the Templates tab, each card’s ⋯ menu offers Edit, Rename, Duplicate, and Delete. The gallery thumbnails render branded, so what you see matches what a send looks like.

Editing a template

Templates open in the same full-screen builder as emails — sections, blocks, device preview, and undo all work identically (see The email builder). Two differences matter:

  • Subject and preview text are optional defaults. A template’s subject line is just the starting value for emails built from it; each email sets its real subject in its own builder.
  • Only universal merge tags are offered. A template can be used anywhere, so its merge-tag picker shows only tags that fill on every send — Customer ({{ customer.first_name }}, {{ customer.orders_count }}), Recipient, Shop ({{ shop.name }}, {{ shop.url }}), and compliance tags like {{ unsubscribe.url }}. Trigger-specific tags (the abandoned-cart URL, the price-dropped product) and campaign-only tags (the gift card code) appear only when you edit an email inside that specific context. The same goes for re-engagement sections — the abandoned cart, checkout, and browse blocks are available only inside their matching automation, so they don’t appear in the template builder.

Saving keeps the builder open so you can keep iterating; once a template exists, edits autosave as you work.

Email branding

Open Marketing → Settings → Template branding. The page is a form on the left and a live sample email on the right — every change re-renders the sample exactly the way a real send would render it, before you save anything.

SectionWhat you set
LogoPick an image from the media library, set its width (60–300 px) and alignment (left, center, right).
BrandThe store name — shown as a text wordmark in the email header when there’s no logo, used as the logo’s alt text, and the fallback for the footer brand line — and the font, chosen from eight email-safe stacks (Helvetica, Arial, Trebuchet MS, Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier New).
ColorsSix brand colors: body text, email background, links, button fill, button label, and button border (used by outline buttons).
FooterFooter brand name (defaults to the store name), business postal address, phone, and contact email, plus a copyright-line toggle and the footer’s own text, unsubscribe-link, and background colors.
Social media iconsA show/hide toggle for the footer’s social row. The actual profile URLs come from your store’s brand settings, linked from this card.

A few details worth knowing:

  • Contact fields have visibility toggles. Phone and contact email each carry an eye toggle that shows or hides them in the footer. Hiding keeps the value — only its visibility flips.
  • The form prefills from your store. Store name, postal address, phone, and email are seeded from your store profile and your default location wherever you haven’t set a value, so the footer is compliant from day one. Saved values are never overwritten by the prefill.
  • A postal address is recommended. Anti-spam law in most markets (CAN-SPAM and equivalents) expects a physical postal address in marketing email footers.
  • Fonts are email-safe stacks on purpose. Web fonts don’t survive Outlook or Gmail; every option here renders consistently across inboxes.

Branding applies at render, not at save

Branding is stored once, per store, and passed to the renderer with every preview and every send. Your email documents stay brand-free. That gives you one powerful rule:

Styling you set explicitly inside a design still wins where you set it: a section with its own background color or a button with its own fill keeps that override. Branding supplies the document-wide styles and the pinned header and footer.

Transactional email shares the same branding

Order confirmations, shipping updates, refunds, gift-card deliveries, and the rest of your transactional mail render through a store-branded shell that reads the same branding object — same logo, wordmark, font, colors, and footer identity. Style it once under Marketing settings and your order confirmation matches your newsletter. Two transactional differences: the shell renders no unsubscribe link (transactional mail isn’t marketing), and where branding fields are empty it falls back to your store’s name and store logo. To send all of it from your own domain, see Email & deliverability.

Fallbacks when things are empty

You don’t need a finished brand kit before your first send:

  • No logo — the header renders your store name as a text wordmark. Add a logo later and every future send switches to it.
  • No branding customized at all — the defaults match the builder’s out-of-the-box design: dark buttons, neutral background, gray footer. Emails look intentional, just not yet yours.
  • No products yet — starter thumbnails and builder previews use a sample catalog so dynamic product sections still show something real-looking. Sends never use sample data; at send time dynamic sections resolve against your live catalog.

Where to go next