Creating Emails

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Emails, the Tented way

If you’ve built a tent, you already know how to build an email: describe what you want, iterate in chat, and watch the preview update live. Every email Tented generates uses battle-tested HTML — bulletproof tables, MSO conditionals for Outlook, dark-mode hooks — so it renders cleanly across Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo, and friends.

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Create your first email

1. Go to Email in the sidebar.
2. Click Add > Create Email.
3. The Choose Email Template gallery opens. Pick a starting point: a design from the Tented example template collection (every one already rendered in your branding), one of your own approved templates, or Blank Email for a clean branded scaffold.
4. Name your email and click Create Email.

You’ll land in the email editor: chat on the left, live preview on the right, with your default from name and address already filled in from email settings.

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Tented Example Templates

The gallery’s headline act is the Tented example template collection: dozens of professionally designed emails covering welcomes, newsletters, product news, promotions, receipts, events, and win-backs. The collection automatically enables your branding. Before you touch a prompt, every design in the gallery renders with the logo, brand color, and company details from your workspace settings, so nothing in it looks like a placeholder. Browse by category (Welcome & Onboarding, Newsletters & Digests, Sales & Promotions, and more), search by name, or click Preview on any card to see it full size. You can also reach the collection any time under Email > Templates, in the Tented Starter Templates row: hover a card and click Use to start a new email from it on the spot. An email created from an example template opens ready to customize:

• The template’s full design, rendered with your logo, brand color, and company footer already in place
• Your default from name, from address, and reply-to prefilled from email settings
• A chat pill recording which template the email started from

The same gallery has a My Templates section listing the email templates your team has uploaded and approved, right next to Tented’s examples. From here on, a template-created email behaves like any other: refine it in chat, personalize it, and approve it, exactly as described below.

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Ask for what you want

Describe the email in the chat box, the same way you’d brief a colleague:

“Write a friendly launch announcement for our new feature ‘Predictive Scheduling’. Include a hero headline, 3 short benefit bullets, and a call-to-action button linking to our site. Personalize the greeting with the recipient’s first name.”

Keep chatting to refine it — “make the tone more playful,” “swap the bullets for a comparison table,” “add a P.S. line.” Each request creates a new generation you can review or roll back. Need visuals? Ask for those too — “add a hero photo of fresh pastries on a marble counter” — and Tented generates the image and codes it in. See Generating Images with AI.

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Edit sections directly

Hover over any part of the email and you’ll see Click to edit — handy for quick text tweaks without a round-trip through the AI.

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Subject lines, preheaders, and personalization

Fill in the Subject and Preheader fields in the header bar. A few niceties built in:

• The subject field has a 50-character guide — stay under it and your subject won’t get clipped on mobile.
• The {} Personalize button inserts personalization tokens — any standard or custom contact field, in the form {{contact.firstName}}. They work in the subject, preheader, and anywhere in the body. (Full token reference: Personalization Tokens.)
• Tokens resolve to an empty string when a contact is missing the value, so add a fallback for anything visible: {{contact.firstName:default=there}} renders as “there” when there’s no first name.
• Tokens can also reformat the value’s casing on the way out — {{contact.firstName:titlecase}} renders “ada” as “Ada”. Four options are available (:lowercase, :uppercase, :sentencecase, :titlecase), and they combine with a fallback in either order. (Details: Formatting values.)
• A “View in browser” link is one token away: point any link at {{tented.viewAsWebpageLink}} and each recipient gets a personal link to a hosted copy of their exact email, live for 12 months after the send. (Details: The view-as-webpage link.)
• Per-email From/Reply-to overrides: any email can use its own sender details instead of the workspace defaults.

Click Personalize and you’ll get a small builder — pick the field, choose optional formatting, set an optional default, and it inserts the token for you: To see personalization with real data, click Preview as and pick a contact — Tented uses their contact and activity data as context.

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Check it on mobile (and in code)

• The mobile preview button renders your email at real device dimensions, with a device picker.
• Code mode (<>) shows the full HTML and a plain-text view. Advanced users can edit the code directly.

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Generation history

The clock icon opens Generation History — every AI generation of this email, with Preview and Revert so you can compare and restore past versions, just like tents.

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Approve it

Here’s the one concept that’s different from tents: emails must be approved before they can send. Approval freezes a known-good version — the one your blasts and flows will actually deliver. Click Approve in the top-right corner and confirm. A few things to know about approval:

• Your Emails list shows each email’s status — Draft or Approved.
• After approving, you can keep editing safely: draft changes aren’t included in sends until you click Approve Update.
• Blasts and flows only offer approved emails (or brand-new ones you compose inline).

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What’s next?