Email Templates

How to build and use email templates to send emails from Táve

Nicole avatar
Written by Nicole
Updated over a week ago

Email templates make sending emails to your clients easy. No more typing the same thing over and over again. Save the messages you send the most often as a template and save time. You can also use tokens to dynamically populate job or client data so the email is ready to go out when you want to use it.

Quick Creating

You can quickly create an email template by clicking 'save as template' from the bottom of any email. If you'd like to manage your templates, or build a new one while you're not composing, go to Settings › Email Templates.

Email Types

You’ll set up your email templates with a certain ‘Email Type’. This determines where in the system the template can be used and also provides context for the tokens inside the template.

General Use

General Use emails are available in the templates menu when on the job’s Mail tab. They are the most non-specific type of email and can be used for a variety of reasons, most often used for initial inquiry responses, follow ups, etc.

Invoicing

When looking at a sales order that has an open invoice, you can use the actions menu to ‘Email Direct Link’ which will bring you to an email composer. The templates menu in that email composer will show your Invoicing email templates.

If you have one of your Invoicing email templates set up as the default it will populate the message automatically. You can, however, use the Templates dropdown to use any of your other Invoicing email templates.

Notice that there is a line under the Subject that says what item the email is referencing. In this case it’s the ‘Invoice for: Wedding Collection 2’. This is important to remember when using tokens. We’ll talk more about it below.

Order Receipts

Order receipt email templates are accessible when using the Actions menu from the order on the Quotes & Orders Tab and selecting Email Direct Link:

An email composer will appear and all of your email templates that you’ve marked as ‘Order Receipts’ will be accessible from the Template dropdown at the top.

Notice how the email is referencing “Collection Three” which is the name of our original order. This will affect which tokens work in the email.

Payment Receipts

There are two ways that Payment Receipt emails are sent: automatically when a payment is made with a credit card or manually when you go to the Financials tab on a job and click on the little mail icon next to the recipient’s name.

Automatically sending a payment receipt:

When you set up your payment gateways through one of the numerous payment processors, you can specify which payment receipt template is sent to your client automatically. You can learn more about that here.

Manually sending a payment receipt:

From a job’s Financials tab, after you have recorded a payment, you can click on the little email icon next to the recipient’s name which will open an email composer where your payment receipt email templates will be accessible through the templates menu:

In your payment receipts email, you can use the {{payment.summary_box}} token to add payment details that are sent to your client.

Turns into:

Quote Invitation

After you’ve created a new quote from the Quotes & Orders tab on a job, you can click the ‘Email Quote’ button to send it.

A new email composer will appear and you’ll be able to access any of your Quote Invitation email templates from the templates menu.

Notice how right below the subject line, the email is referencing ‘GIF and Giggle Photo Booth’. That is the context of the tokens in the email.

Questionnaire Invitation

When you create Questionnaire Invitation email templates, they are accessible by clicking on the ’email’ button after you’ve created a questionnaire invitation:

A new email composer will appear where your Questionnaire Invitation email templates will be available from the Templates dropdown menu.

Notice how under the subject line, the email is referencing the questionnaire we’re sending.

Contract Invitation

When sending a contract outside of a quote/proposal, you’ll send it by clicking on the ’email’ button after you’ve added a contract on the Contracts tab. This is where your Contract Invitation email templates will be available:

A new email composer will appear and you’ll be able to access any of your contract email templates from the templates menu.

Notice how right below the subject line, the email is referencing NKP Wedding Contract. That is the context of the tokens in the email.

Adding Tokens

Tokens allow you to populate data into your emails without having to type it manually.

You’ll then be presented with a token browser where you can search for and insert tokens. Click here for a complete list of tokens available.

Tokens in Context

Because tokens are data specific, they need to be in the right context in order to show the right information.

Remember how when we are sending our email templates above and each email type has a different item it was referencing? In the example below our ‘Invoicing’ email is referencing ‘Invoice for: Collection Three’. Because we are referencing an invoice in this case, the invoice tokens will work. Outside of an ‘Invoicing’ email, the tokens won’t know what data to fill in there because it will be out of context.

Item Tokens

Item tokens represent the referenced items in our emails.

Whenever we’re using an email template, other than a ‘General Use’ template, we’re sending a link to something; a questionnaire, a proposal, an invoice, an order, etc. So there are certain tokens, that we need to ALWAYS include in those emails. They are our ‘item’ tokens. We can actually use several different methods and achieve the same results.

Method 1 - {{item.name_link}}

When used alone, this will create a hyperlink to the item you’re referencing.

This is the easiest method.

This will turn the token into a hyperlink like this:

Invoice for: Wedding Collection 2 

Method 2- {{item.link_start}} and {{item.link_end}}

Using the item link start and end tokens turn everything in between them into the hyperlink to your item.

This will turn into a hyperlink like this:

Balance Invoice 

Method 3 - {{item.link_start}} {{item.name}} {{item.link_end}}

Just like Method 2, we’re using the item link start and end tokens to turn everything in between into a hyperlink. We’re also adding the item.name token to insert our referenced item in there.

This will turn into this:

Please complete our Wedding Proposal. 

our Wedding Proposal will be hyperlinked here.

Method 4 - {{item.link_url}}

This method works, but it’s not the prettiest.

This will replace the token with the URL to the referenced item like this:

http://tave.com/yourbrandalias/proposal/959f44ab523bc3e22f9c5a0b/6593e5aca730771fcca494e8 

Did this answer your question?