Your Complete Guide to Salesforce Lightning Email Templates

Do you like receiving plain text emails from businesses, or does this look a bit shabby? Salesforce comes to the rescue with Lightning Email Templates. Using the Lightning email builder, built on the Salesforce platform, you are able to insert fields into email templates (mail merge) from a record in Salesforce to use across a range of use cases (e.g. for sales emails, renewals, and case updates).

You and your users can use the Lightning Email Template Builder directly (providing they use Lightning). It works with merge fields in email alerts, Flow, Approval Processes and more. It’s better and much more modern than Salesforce Classic Email Templates, and is also the same builder that’s been rolled out across many other Salesforce platform products, such as Pardot.

In this article, we’ll look at how to set up Lightning Email Templates (note: they are not enabled by default!). Then we will dive into its key features, what it looks like in practice, and its limitations.

Great news: It’s easy to update existing Email Alerts to use a new Lightning email template – you just need to edit the Email Alert and point it to the new Lightning email template.

This is a two-part process (perhaps try it in a sandbox first!).

This part is not mandatory, just very helpful to all your users, so they can share and access email templates amongst themselves.

3. Tick Access drag-and-drop content builder (this controls whether the “Edit in Builder” button appears later on).

4. Save.

5. Apply to users as appropriate.

6. Wait 15 minutes*. If you don’t see “Edit in Builder” when using the Template Builder in the next section, then your system still hasn’t been updated.

*or log out and back in again – this is to avoid the Lightning delay!

2. Create a new template. Here you put in the “metadata” for the email, such as the subject line, which object it relates to (if you want to merge field data into it), and where it should be saved. The body of the email comes soon, but not quite yet!

3. The next screen will have an Edit in Builder button. Click it!

4. Once in the email screen itself (which we’ll fully explore in the next section), you will probably want to update the background color as your first action item. If grey is your thing, then leave it alone, but for everything else, go to Style (on the right), click the color selection box, and change it to #FFFFFF or 255, 255, 255 to reset the background to white.

Add images to email templates in Salesforce Lightning easily by dragging an image component from the left-hand sidebar on to the email canvas.

5. Welcome to the Lightning Email Builder!

You’ll recognize the layout of the Content Builder. On the left-hand side are the drag and drop components. The exciting part is that there’s clearly scope for new elements to be added over time.

On the right-hand side, the properties/details of each component can be adjusted, such as merge fields for rich text, image location (which you can directly upload), or color, margin, and image width in the “Style” subsection.

Press Save, and then you’re ready to use the email template!

As discussed, you can use these in an Email Alert, or end users can use them directly within Salesforce when creating an email. At the bottom of the email screen, there’s the insert, create, or update template button, which users can click to select the template that they want.

And, with that previously mentioned – but avoidable – default grey background creeping in at the sides, here’s the final result when received and viewed on mobile:

If you’re keen to continue learning about Salesforce Lightning Email Templates, check out the resources below:

Finally, huge thanks go to Johann Furmann and Justyna Krajewska for their input on this article.