Branding - Customizing System Emails

System emails include:

• Credit card declined notifications
• Forgot password
• Affiliate Commission earned
• New lead signup
• New customer signup
• etc.

All system emails can be customized. No system generated emails will ever carry the SoftwareProjects brand or appear to be originating from the SoftwareProjects domain.

You can have your own look & feel, from name, from email address and your own design.

As part of this post, I wanted to explain how to do just that -

For the purpose of this example, we're going to customize the header of all outgoing emails to include a nice banner at the top.

Step 1: Login to your SoftwareProjects account and click on the 'Branding' module.



Step 2: You'll notice on the left navigation menu, two options under 'Emails' - Messages and Templates.



Messages are all system event-driven email messages that are delivered to your users. Templates are building blocks that can be included by Messages to facilitate easy updates.

For example - instead of typing your company name and address at the bottom of each email message, you can use the templates 'company_name' and 'company_address' as part of your messages. This way, if you ever move and have to update your company address, changing the template will automatically update all messages simultaneously.

Since we're looking to modify the 'header' across all email messages, go ahead and click on 'templates'

Step 3: Click on the 'header' template

An editor window opens up, allowing us to modify the HTML as well as the plain-text version of the 'header' template. The reason we'd want to use a slightly different version for HTML vs plain-text, is because with HTML we can include images and other various styles while with plain-text we can only use text.



Every email message delivered by the system includes both the HTML and plain-text version. As you can see in the case of the 'header' template, the plain-text version is blank. This means we don't have any special header for plain-text messages.

Step 4: In the HTML version, locate the section directly after the BODY, and add this code to render a horizontal banner across the top:



Click 'Save Changes' and we're all done.

Step 5: To test the effect of this change, click on 'Messages', pick any message and click HTML Preview to preview the message. Here's how the 'Forgot Password' message now looks like:



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Be sure to provide both an html and plain-text version of your messages.

All common elements in your email messages (header, footer, copyright notice etc.) can be stored under Email Templates and then easily embedded into all messages, without having to retype the text.