Email Design Best Practices

[Alex Edmiston1]

What is best practice for email designs? From what I've seen & read, there seem to be 3 options:

1. Send emails with no styling (company header/footer, image, etc), plain text

2. Style emails using email scripts & reference those in your email templates

3. Style emails using the email layout feature. Connect your layouts to templates & notifications for styling. 

Is anyone using layouts for their email notifications & templates? Layouts seem to be the best practice, out of box way to do this but I would like to get input from everyone...

[Fabian Kunzke · Accepted solution]

Hello,

For me the best way has been point 3. Usually i define one general Layout to have a consistent style throughout all notifications. Then email scripts are used to generate content-bricks for emails. Since some of the notifications send the same set of email bricks i use templates to set up reusable mails for similar notifications.

This way setting up notifications and maintaining them is pretty neat.

Hope this helps.

Greetings

Fabian

[JC S_]

Definitely point 3.

Having a single Email Layout record to maintain is such a wonderful thing. Modularization of the layout (Email Layout) and content (Mail Scripts) is advantageous since you make the maintainability of your email notifications easier.

• Create 1 Email Layout (or more per department, special company events, etc.)
• Create mail scripts for your header/footer contents then just reference it on your Email Layout so that you minimize the need to touch the Email Layout
• Create mail scripts for surfacing contents (you can do amazing things here since it supports Glide Record, conditional statements, etc.)
• Create Email Templates for those that use the same set of mail scripts or to connect layout to notification

In case you need to apply Email Layout to your scheduled reports as well, we are able to do it and use the same Email Layout we use for notifications 🙂

Read more on this post: Learn how to apply your company branding using Email Layout for notifications and scheduled reports

[Alex Edmiston1]

Thanks JC, very helpful. What's the purpose of using mail scripts for header/footer contents if you can do that within the layout? Seems like you're potentially creating excess records but overall great response, thanks!

[JC S_]

Hi Alex, if you have multiple layouts and want to use the same header/footer contents then using mail scripts for them is desirable since you don't need to edit the layouts manually to update the contents. Just update the mail script and all layouts that use them will just get the same content. It really depends on your business requirements.

I encourage you to read my post regarding our approach. You can actually skip the Email Template referencing between Email Layout and Email Notifications if you decide to use the Business Rule approach to apply the Email Layout (since you will need multiple Email Template for each table you send notifications).