Have a message you send out regularly—like a weekly newsletter, devotional, or church announcements? Templates make it easy to share God’s love and keep your community engaged. Add images, videos, and more to create meaningful, interactive emails that help your people stay connected and encouraged!
You can either create your own custom templates to use, or use some premade Gloo templates for inspiration!
Using a Gloo Template
Want to start sending out some regular communications, but don't know how to start? We got you! Gloo offers several templates you can work from for communications on different events, sermon series, new visitor followups, etc, and will only continue to add more!
To get started using a Gloo Template for email, just navigate to Communications -> Email -> Templates and click on the template you'd like to explore.
When selecting a template, you'll be given a full preview of what the template looks like. To continue with this template, click Use Template.
This will automatically create a personal version of the template that you can customize. Any piece of the template can be edited or removed, and new pieces can be added, so feel free to make any changes you'd like! For some more guidance on how to use each feature of the email editor, check out our full email guide. When you have everything the way you like it, click Save Template in the top right corner.
Once you've saved, you'll see a green message letting you know the template has been saved, but nothing on the page will automatically change.
Just navigate back to Communications -> Email -> Templates. You'll now see a new section called My Templates. Click the 3 vertical dots under the email to use, edit, duplicate, or delete the template. We'll go through each of these actions later in this article.
Creating a new template from scratch
While Gloo's premade templates may give you inspiration, you can also create your own custom templates completely from scratch at any time, and save them for use later.
Navigate to the Email tab under Communications. Click Create New Email.
Design your email. Need help using the editor? Check out our full email guide for more information!
As you design the email, the system auto-saves it every minute or so. Once you are done, click the Save button on the top right. Note that if the system has recently auto-saved, the button will be green. If there hasn't been a recent auto-save, the button will be red. Whichever color it is, you can click on it to manually save your email draft.
You can now choose to save your email as either a draft or a template. Saving as a draft will let you come back later to edit the email, but keeps it as a single email. Click Save as Template to recreate a reusable template.
Give your template a name, and configure the email subject line that will be attached to the template. This is how the email will display in people's inboxes, but it can be changed and customized each time you send the template. Click Save Template.
That's it! Your template is now saved and can be accessed under the Templates tab in the My Templates section. Click the 3 vertical dots under the email to use, edit, duplicate, or delete the template. We'll go through each of these actions later in this article.
Using, Editing, Duplicating and Deleting Templates
Once you have a template created that you like, click the 3 vertical dots under it to use, edit, duplicate, or delete it.
Use a Template
Clicking Use will automatically create a draft email using the template. As with any other email, you can customize any portion of this before sending. If, for example, your template is for your weekly newsletter, just drop the appropriate content into the template and send it out!
Once your message is crafted and ready to send, click on Add Recipients in the upper right corner.
Make sure all of the required fields listed here are filled in:
Subject line: The email subject that will be displayed to recipients
From name: The name of the person the email is coming from that will be displayed. We recommend using your church name here, or your pastor's name.
Recipients: Who in your Gloo account the email will be delivered to (if they have a valid email address)
Reply to email address: If someone replies to your email, this is where their reply will go, since emails will not come into your Gloo inbox.
Whether you'd like to send the email now, schedule it for later, or schedule it as a recurring email
Note that you can also exclude specific people or groups- for example, maybe you want to send the email to everyone except for your Volunteers group. Simply add that Group into the exclusion list.
In the Preview area at the bottom of the screen you can preview your email in different environments - desktop, tablet and mobile devices, light and dark mode, and different resolutions and screen sizes.
Once you are confident your email is designed the way you want, click Preview in the upper right corner to move onto the final step.
Confirm everything one last time and click Send to send your email!
Edit a Template
If you click Edit you can make changes to the master template without creating a draft email or sending a message. Just make sure you click Save Template once your edits are finished!
Duplicate a Template
If you click Duplicate you can create a duplicate version of that template that you can modify and save as a separate template. This can be useful if you need multiple, similar templates and don't want to manually redo your work each time.
For example, you may have a template for prayer requests and want to create one for announcements that looks very similar. Rather than starting from scratch, you can duplicate your prayer request template, edit it to the announcements version, and then save both templates.
Delete a Template
If you click Delete you can delete your template and remove it from your account. Note that this action is permanent, and your deleted templates cannot be recovered!
