Email templates#

Karla can email your customers directly using templates you own and manage inside Karla. Paired with the Send Karla email action in Shopify Flow, this lets any Karla trigger — a delivery issue, a delivered parcel, a new claim — send a fully branded email without an external email tool in the middle.

Two pieces work together:

Templates — email content authored in Karla, with variables that are filled in per customer and shipment at send time.
The Flow action — Send Karla email carries the whole event payload a Karla trigger provides and sends the email to the recipient you choose; Karla fills in the template's variables from that payload.

How templates are organized#

Cloned from a catalog — you don't start from a blank page. Karla ships a catalog of ready-made templates covering the common post-purchase moments; clone one into your shop and adapt the copy and branding.
Organized by tags — templates carry freeform tags (e.g. delivery-issues, returns, de). Tags are purely for organizing and filtering your template list — they have no effect on sending.
Selected by name — the Flow action references a template by its name. Keep names unique and descriptive, and treat them as stable identifiers: renaming a template means updating every Flow workflow that points at it.

Template syntax#

Variables are written with double braces — {{ variable }}, not single braces like {variable}. This is plain token substitution, not a template engine: filters, conditionals, loops, and other Jinja/Liquid features are not supported, and any {{ … }} that isn't a known variable is left unchanged.

Hi {{ customer_first_name }},

good news — your order {{ order_name }} was delivered to your neighbour
{{ neighbour_name }}.

You can review the full delivery history any time:
{{ trackpage_url }}

At send time Karla substitutes each variable with the matching value from the event the Flow action carries. Only use variables that the event you're reacting to actually provides — for example, neighbour_name is only populated by the delivered-to-neighbour event.

Variable reference#

Template variables are the curated set Karla exposes for email templates — the same list the portal's template editor offers in its variable picker. Karla substitutes only these tokens; they are the complete authoring vocabulary.

The Shipment events and Claim events reference documents the underlying event payloads and is useful background for understanding which event populates which value — but write your templates with the token names below, not raw payload field names.

Shipment and order variables:

Variable	Description
`tracking_number`	The carrier tracking number.
`trackpage_url`	The branded Karla tracking page URL.
`carrier`	The carrier name.
`expected_delivery_date`	Estimated delivery date (dd.mm.yyyy).
`updated_at`	When the shipment or claim was last updated.
`order_name`	The order name (e.g. #1001).
`order_number`	The order number.
`zip_code`	Delivery postal code.
`number_of_shipments`	Number of shipments in the order.
`pickup_address`	Pickup point address (parcel shop or locker).
`neighbour_name`	Name of the neighbour who accepted the parcel.
`shipment_id`	Karla shipment identifier.

Claim variables, populated by the claim events:

Variable	Description
`claim_id`	Karla claim identifier.
`reason`	The claim reason.
`resolution_preference`	The customer's preferred claim resolution.
`description`	The customer's claim description.
`created_at`	When the claim was created.
`image_urls`	Customer-provided claim image URLs.

Customer variables, available across events:

Variable	Description
`customer_email`	Customer email address — also the default email recipient.
`customer_first_name`	Customer first name.
`customer_last_name`	Customer last name.

Set it up in Shopify Flow#

Prerequisites#

The Karla Shopify app is installed and connected to your shop.
Karla email notifications are enabled for your shop. Sending emails through Karla is a premium setting — if it is disabled, the action returns 403 and the Flow run is marked failed without a retry.
The referenced template is active. An inactive or missing template returns 404 and the run fails.

Create the workflow#

In Shopify admin, open Shopify Flow and create a new workflow.
Pick a Karla trigger for the moment you want to react to. A curated set of shipment and issue triggers is available — e.g. Delivery Failed or Delivered to Neighbour — covering the most common moments from the Karla event catalog; not every event has a Flow trigger. Each trigger exposes the whole event as a single Event data variable.
Add the Send Karla email action to the workflow.
Fill in the action's three fields:
- Event data — insert the trigger's Event data variable. That's the only insert needed; there is no per-field mapping.
- Recipient — map the customer's email address, e.g. {{ customer.email }}. This field is required; if it renders empty at runtime, Karla falls back to the event's customer_email.
- Template name — type the exact name of the template you cloned and adapted in Karla.
Activate the workflow and run a test order to verify the rendered email.

Because the action selects templates by name, you can reuse the same template across several workflows — or point different triggers at different templates for tone-appropriate messaging per event.

Events — the event hierarchy behind Karla triggers.
Shipment events — the full catalogue of shipment events and their payloads.
Claim events — the claim events and their payloads.
Shopify — installing the Karla Shopify app and the two notification paths.
Notify integrations — using an external ESP (Klaviyo, Brevo, …) instead of Karla-sent emails.