Email flows#
Email flows are the emails Karla sends to your customers on your behalf — order updates, delivery issues, resolve confirmations — built from templates you own and manage. In the Karla Portal, go to Notify → Email templates to open the Email flows page.
Karla Notify has a few distinct pieces. Email flows (this page) are the content of emails Karla itself sends. The Notify integrations forward shipment events to an external email tool (Klaviyo, Brevo, …) that sends its own emails. Custom triggers are time-based signals delivered to Klaviyo as metrics — they don't send emails themselves.
Availability and roles#
Sending emails through Karla is a premium add-on. Until it's enabled for your shop, the page shows a Karla email sending banner with a Premium badge — you can browse the catalog and preview templates, but not create or send anything. Use the Contact us button to get it enabled.
What you can do on the page depends on your portal role:
| Role | What you can do |
|---|---|
| viewer | Browse flows, the templates catalog, and previews |
| editor | Create, edit, activate, and test-send flows |
| admin | Everything above, plus delete flows and change sender settings |
The three tabs#
| Tab | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Active email flows | The flows your shop owns — activate, test, edit, and delete them |
| Templates catalog | Ready-made templates to clone into your shop |
| Settings | Sender settings, and the custom sending domain on enterprise tier |
Start from the catalog#
The Templates catalog tab lists ready-made templates grouped into Order update emails and Resolve emails, so you never start from a blank page.
- Preview opens the template in a side panel; templates that exist in several languages show one tab per language.
- Use template clones the template into your shop's flows — a toast confirms it was added. Multi-language templates show Choose language instead: pick the language in the preview and confirm with Use template in EN (or the language you chose).
Some catalog cards carry an Automatic badge. It's a category hint derived from the template's tags — it doesn't schedule or send anything by itself. A flow only goes out when something sends it, such as the Send Karla email action in Shopify Flow.
Edit your flow#
New flows open in the block builder; templates cloned from the catalog open in the raw HTML editor, since they ship as full HTML documents. The block builder shows a live preview next to these fields:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Email title | The flow's name in your list |
| Tags | Freeform labels for organizing and filtering your flows |
| Enable email automation | Whether the flow is active — same as the Active switch in the list |
| Language | The flow's language. Multi-language flows aren't supported yet, and it can't be changed later |
| Subject | The email subject line |
| Email preview | The preheader text inboxes show next to the subject |
| Upload Email hero | The hero image at the top of the email |
The body is assembled from Text, Image, and Spacer blocks that you can reorder and remove. Text blocks offer White, Light gray, and Gray backgrounds; spacers range from 8 to 48 px. The footer's logo, colour, and content are configurable as well. Save with Save and create for a new flow, or Save changes when editing.
Personalize with variables#
Write variables with double braces — {{ variable }} — and Karla fills in
the value per customer and shipment at send time. The editor lists every
available variable as a clickable chip, grouped into Shipment variables,
Resolve variables, Customer variables, and Other variables; click
a chip to insert it into the focused field.
- Substitution is plain token replacement — no conditionals, loops, or filters.
- Unknown variables — and known variables the send has no value for — render as an empty string, so a stray token never leaks into a customer email.
- Values are HTML-escaped automatically.
- Append
_urlencodedto any variable name (like{{ order_number_urlencoded }}) to insert its URL-encoded value for use inside links.
The full variable list, and which events populate which value, lives in the email templates reference.
Activate and test#
Back on Active email flows, each flow has an Active switch. Only active flows can be sent — for example by the Send Karla email action in Shopify Flow — and only active flows can receive a test email.
To sanity-check a flow, click its Send test email action (for inactive flows the button is disabled with the hint "Activate the template to send a test email"). Enter a Recipient — the field is prefilled with your own email address — and click Send test. The test email fills all variables with sample values, and a toast confirms it was queued.
Manage your flows#
The Active email flows table shows each flow's Name, Language, Tags, and Active state, with a search box to filter by name. Create new flow starts a fresh flow in the block builder. Deleting a flow is admin-only and permanent — the confirmation dialog warns that the template will be permanently deleted.
Sender settings#
The Settings tab shows whether Karla email sending is Enabled for your shop, and lets shop admins adjust how sent emails present themselves:
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Replies sent to | [email protected] | The reply-to address, e.g. [email protected] |
| Sender display name | Your shop's name | The sender name customers see in their inbox |
Click Save sender settings to apply the changes (admin only).
On the enterprise email tier you can go further and send from your own domain — see Send from your own domain.