Email templates#
Email templates are the emails Karla sends to your customers on your behalf — order updates, delivery issues, resolve confirmations — written and owned by you. In the Karla Portal, go to Notify → Email templates.
A template on its own doesn't send anything. Karla sends it when something triggers it:
- Automations — pick a shipment, return, or claim event and a template, and Karla sends it automatically. No other tool needed.
- The Send Karla email action in Shopify Flow — send a template from your own Shopify Flow workflows.
Karla Notify has a few distinct pieces. Email templates (this page) are the content of emails Karla itself sends, and automations decide when they go out. 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 your templates, the catalog, and previews, 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 templates, the templates catalog, and previews |
| editor | Create, edit, activate, and test-send templates |
| admin | Everything above, plus delete templates and change sender settings |
The three tabs#
| Tab | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Your templates | The templates 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 the 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 templates — 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 template only goes out when an automation or the Send Karla email action in Shopify Flow sends it.
Edit your template#
New templates 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 template's name in your list |
| Tags | Freeform labels for organizing and filtering your templates |
| Enable email automation | Whether the template is active — same as the Active switch in the list |
| Language | The template's language. Multi-language templates 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 template, 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#
On Your templates, each template has an Active switch. Only active templates can be sent — by an automation or by the Send Karla email action in Shopify Flow — and only active templates can receive a test email. Deactivating a template that an automation uses pauses that automation's emails until you activate it again.
To sanity-check a template, click its Send test email action (for inactive templates 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 templates#
The Your templates table shows each template's Name, Language, Tags, and Active state. Create new template starts a fresh template in the block builder. Deleting a template is admin-only and permanent — the confirmation dialog warns that the template will be permanently deleted.
- Search — the Search templates... box filters by name, tag, or language. Once you have more than 20 templates, the list is split into pages (20, 50, or 100 per page) and search only covers the current page; click Search all templates to load all your templates on one page and search across them.
- 100-template limit — a shop can have up to 100 email templates. When you reach it, the page shows a 100-template limit reached warning, and Create new template and Use template are disabled until you delete one.
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). The settings apply to every email Karla sends from your templates, including automation emails. The exception is the shipping emails switched on under Transactional emails: they use the Sender name and Reply-to email set on that page.
On the enterprise email tier you can go further and send from your own domain — see Send from your own domain.