Building and using templates

Templates save your best messages for reuse, so each campaign starts from proven content instead of a blank box.

Prerequisites and permissions

Requires Campaigns access (see the Campaigns overview). Templates are wiki pages, so creating one also requires Wiki access — by default Admin and Manager.

How templates actually work

This is the most important thing to know: the campaign wizard pulls templates from the Wiki, not from the Templates page.

• To offer an SMS template in the wizard, create a Wiki page and tag it sms-template.
• To offer an email template, create a Wiki page and tag it email-template.

Those tagged pages then appear in the wizard’s Content step (Step 3), searchable and paginated — click one to apply it. For email, the wiki page becomes the subject line and HTML body; an email campaign requires a template, so this is the only way to give your staff email content to choose from. For SMS, the template just prefills the message box, where staff can keep editing.

If no tagged pages exist, the wizard says so plainly — for example, “No SMS templates found. Create wiki pages tagged sms-template to use them here.”

Creating a template (the real workflow)

1. Go to Wiki in the sidebar and create a new page.
2. Write your message. For email, the page content is the email body; for SMS, keep it short (one 160-character segment is ideal).
3. Tag the page email-template (for email) or sms-template (for SMS).
4. Save. The page now appears in the campaign wizard’s Content step for that channel.

Personalization

Add merge fields so each recipient sees their own values. The wizard’s Insert menu uses these tokens:

• {{patient_first_name}} / {{patient_last_name}} — the patient’s name
• {{site_name}} — your practice name
• {{site_officephone}} — your practice phone
• {{site_address1}} — your practice address

Patient appointment variables such as {{apt_date}} resolve to each patient’s real data on send (and to sample data in a test message). “Hi {{patient_first_name}}!” consistently outperforms “Dear patient”.

About the Templates page

Where: Sidebar > Campaigns > Templates

Caution

The Templates page (heading Email Templates) is a preview that currently runs on built-in sample data. Creating, renaming, duplicating, or deleting a template here only changes the page in your browser — nothing is saved to the server, and the changes are lost on refresh. It does not feed the campaign wizard. Until this page is wired to real data, create templates as wiki pages (above). We’ll update this article when the page goes live.

For reference, the page shows a card grid (with a grid/list view toggle), a Search templates… box, a type filter (All Types / Email / SMS / SMS & Email), usage counts, and sortable columns (Name, Type, Created on, Uses). Each card’s menu offers Create Newsletter, Rename, Edit, Duplicate, Download HTML, and Delete. A Create Template / Edit Template modal has Template Name, Type, Subject Line, SMS Content (with an X / 160 characters counter), and Email Content (raw HTML).

Related

• Creating a campaign
• A/B testing