Templates & design
Learn how Pulse templates work and how to customize them to match your brand, products, and customers.
April 20, 2026
You don't need design skills or a developer to send emails that look professional. This guide covers how templates work in Pulse and how to make them feel like your brand rather than a generic layout.
Starting from a template
Every campaign and automation in Pulse starts from a ready-made template rather than a blank page. This matters more than it might seem, staring at an empty canvas is where most people get stuck.
Templates exist for every common campaign type, newsletters, promotional sends, transactional emails (like order confirmations), and cart recovery layouts, so whatever you're trying to send, there's already a reasonable starting point built for it.
Making a template look like yours
Templates are meant to be a starting point, not a finished product. You can customize:
- Colors — match your brand's palette instead of a generic default.
- Fonts — keep typography consistent with the rest of your store.
- Blocks — rearrange, add, or remove sections (images, text, buttons, product grids) to fit what you're actually trying to say.
The goal is that after customizing, a template shouldn't look like "a template" anymore, it should look like it was built specifically for your brand.
Dynamic product blocks
One of the more useful pieces of a template is the product block, a section that automatically pulls in product images, names, and prices directly from your store.
Because this data is live (covered in more detail in "Campaign builder & personalization"), you don't have to manually update a product block if a price changes or an item goes out of stock, it reflects your actual store automatically.
Designing for mobile
A large share of emails are opened on a phone, not a desktop screen. Every template in Pulse is mobile-responsive by default, meaning it automatically adjusts its layout to look right on a smaller screen without you having to build a separate mobile version.
It's still worth previewing your email on both desktop and mobile before sending, since content that looks fine on a wide screen can sometimes feel cramped on a narrow one.
Previewing before you send
Before any campaign goes out, you can preview exactly how it will look, both on desktop and mobile, right inside the builder.
This is the point to catch anything that looks off, a broken image, an oddly placed button, text that wraps strangely, before it reaches a real customer's inbox.
A/B testing your design choices
If you're unsure whether a particular layout, image, or piece of content will perform better than another version, you can test both.
Rather than guessing which design choice is right, Pulse lets you run both versions and see which one actually gets better results, then lean on that data for future campaigns.
A practical starting point
If you're setting up your first few templates, it's worth prioritizing the ones tied directly to revenue first, cart recovery, checkout recovery, and order confirmation, since these are the emails most likely to be opened and acted on.
Newsletter and promotional templates can be refined over time as you get a feel for what resonates with your audience.