Email templates

Templates are the messages NineOffer sends. They are edited under Templates and Email Settings.

Chunks

A template is assembled from chunks — blocks of content rather than one undifferentiated body. This lets you keep a greeting, the estimate breakdown and your terms as separate pieces, and reorder or reuse them without rewriting the message.

Conditions

A chunk can be conditional: shown only when the lead’s answers meet a condition. The same mechanism as pricing conditions.

Use it to say something specific rather than something generic. A customer who selected an urgent timeline can be told what “urgent” actually means for your schedule; everyone else never sees that paragraph.

Tokens

Templates can insert values from the lead and the workspace. {{sender_name}} is the workspace Sender name from Email Settings — or the template’s own override, if you set one.

Note that this is body content, not the sending identity. See the three sender fields.

In the editor a variable appears as a pill, and it takes formatting like any other text. Select it — drag across it, use Shift and the arrow keys, or double-click it — and use B, I or S (or Ctrl/Cmd + B and I) to make it bold, italic or crossed out. A selection that mixes text and variables formats all of it, and pressing the button again takes the formatting off just what you selected. The pill shows the formatting, and in the email the value is formatted the same way. Variables also work on a line of their own in a bullet list. The one exception is a conditional section’s pill, which can’t be formatted as a whole; format the text inside the section instead.

The Accept button

An estimate email can carry a Yes, I’m interested button. When the customer presses it, the lead is marked Accepted and you get an email saying so — your cue to prepare the proposal, contract or invoice.

In the content editor, Accept button inserts one below the paragraph you are in, coloured like your widget’s buttons. Edit its label like any other text. The default template already has one. To link from your own text instead, use the {{accept_url}} token (under Pricing).

What the customer sees:

1. The button opens a page with your business name, the service and the price.
2. They press Confirm. Only this step accepts — opening the link alone does nothing, because mail scanners open links in emails automatically.
3. Pressing it again just shows that they have already confirmed. You are notified once.

A few things worth knowing:

• The link works for 60 days from when the email was sent. Re-sending the email from the Leads page issues a fresh link; older links keep working until they expire.
• The link is only filled in for emails to the customer. In internal emails {{accept_url}} is empty, so a colleague cannot accept on the customer’s behalf by mistake.
• In a Test Lead email (Pricing Rules) and in the template preview, the button opens a demo page that records nothing.
• accept_url is reserved — a custom variable cannot use that name.

The proposal request button

The next step after Accept: a Get a detailed proposal button that opens a short form instead of a one-click confirmation. In the content editor, open Answers and press Insert proposal request button. The link on its own is the {{proposal_url}} token (under Pricing). You can use both buttons in one email.

The form asks what the proposal should cover, when they would like to start and whether to reach them by email or phone. When they send it:

• the lead moves to Proposal requested (from New or Accepted — a lead you have already moved further keeps its status);
• it also counts as accepting the estimate;
• you get an email with what they wrote, and the lead’s card shows it under Proposal request.

Sending it again changes nothing. The link follows the same rules as the Accept link: 60 days, customer emails only, a demo page in test sends and the preview, and proposal_url is reserved.

Custom variables

Custom Variables in the sidebar holds workspace-level values you want available across templates and documents — company address, VAT number, standard terms, booking links.

Define them once and reference them everywhere. When something changes, you edit one value instead of hunting through every template that mentioned it.

Design

Every email is sent in one design: a plain white page and a single narrow column, with your company name at the top and the message below it in small, light type. Bold text stands out as a label against the light text beside it, links are plain and underlined, and there are no cards, buttons or dividers. There is nothing to switch on or apply. You write the message; the column is put around it — in the preview and in the email that goes out.

Templates you already had are moved into the design the first time you open Email Settings after the update, including ones that were in the earlier grey-card design. Their wording is not changed. The editor only ever shows your message, never the column around it.

The design also styles what you write inside the message, so it looks the same whoever typed it: paragraphs get the same spacing, bold text is a shade darker, links are dark and underlined rather than the mail client’s blue, and bullet lists get an even indent and gap. Conditional sections get exactly the same treatment as the rest of the message, so a section that appears for one lead reads like the text around it.

Your own formatting

Formatting you set by hand — a font, a size, a colour, spacing, or a message built from styled blocks — is kept as you wrote it, because the design does not override it. That also means such a template won’t match the others. When a template (or any of its conditional sections) has formatting like that, the Content tab says so and offers Reset formatting.

Resetting removes the hand-set styling so the default design applies. The wording, links and {{tokens}} stay exactly as they were, and it covers the conditional sections too. A styled heading becomes a bold line, and a block that only wrapped other blocks is dropped. It can’t be undone, so you’re asked to confirm first. Only the template you have open is changed.

The company name at the top is the {{company_name}} custom variable, which you define once for the workspace. A variable you have not defined renders as nothing, so that line would be blank. The Content tab warns you when it is missing. There is no logo image: mail clients like Gmail and Outlook drop images embedded in an email, so the name stands in for it.

The starter messages

New templates start with a short note in the same style — a greeting, the estimate and a sign-off — for you to rewrite.

Pointing a template at the owner instead of the customer turns a template that still has the starter note into the owner’s notification: the estimate, who it is for, every question with its answer, and a link to the lead in the dashboard. The subject becomes New lead: {{price}}. A template you have already edited only changes its recipient.

To add the answers to any template yourself, open Answers in the editor and choose Insert all answers. It adds one row per question of the current flow — the question in bold, the answer beside it. A question the lead skipped shows as its label with nothing after it. This writes out the questions as they are now, so a question you add later has to be inserted again.

Pasting your own HTML

You can paste your own markup in the editor’s source mode, but paste the message, not a whole email layout — the design’s column always goes around it. Markup is also cleaned when you save, because mail clients ignore most of what a web page can do. Keep to tables and inline styles. These are removed: <style> blocks (so no media queries), class and id, the <html>/<head>/<body> wrapper, the background shorthand (use background-color), letter-spacing, box-shadow, url() values, and in-between font weights such as 650 (use 400, 500, 600, 700 or bold).

Recipients

Each template sets who receives it — the customer, internal addresses, or both. Check this before you go live: a template with no internal recipient means a lead can arrive and nobody hears about it.