Build the Email, Then Send Yourself the Proof
Drag the blocks, style them once against your brand, and mail yourself a real test through your own account before anyone else sees it. KudosCRM compiles it through MJML, keeps your CSS and Outlook markup intact at send time, and tells you what a spam filter will think while you are still editing.
Q4 Renewal Notice Designer · v7
Content
H Heading¶ Text▭ ButtonMedia
🖼 Image▶ VideoAdvanced
</> HTMLLOGO
Hi {{first|there}}, your plan renews soonediting inline
Your {{company}} subscription renews on {{deal.close_date}}. Nothing changes unless you tell us to.
🖼 image block · alt text set
Review your plan
{{organization}} · Unsubscribe
Brand theme
Body font
Poppins
Content width
600px
Button radius
8px
The Short Version
What Is the KudosCRM Email Builder?
The KudosCRM email builder is a drag-and-drop editor for the emails your CRM sends. You drop blocks on a canvas, style them against a brand theme you set once, personalize with merge tokens that read your real records, and save the result as a template your campaigns, sequences, and automations all reuse. It compiles through MJML, so what you build survives Outlook.
A Canvas, Not a Form
Twelve block types, inline rich-text editing on the canvas itself, undo and redo, and a guard that stops you losing unsaved work.
A Library, Not a Folder
Private or shared templates, categories, snippets, favorites, one-click duplicate, archive, and version history you can restore from.
Proof Before You Send
A real test send through your own mailbox, preview bound to an actual deal or contact, and a spam lint that scores the draft you have not saved yet.
Honest Numbers Afterwards
Sent, opens, clicks and replies per template over 7, 30, or 90 days, with Apple's privacy-proxy opens kept out of the headline rate.
Broken tokens stay visible on purpose. An unknown token with a fallback resolves to the fallback; without one it is left visibly literal rather than silently blanked, so a missing field is something you catch in the proof instead of something your customer notices.
The Canvas
Twelve Blocks, Grouped So You Can Find Them
You build a design by dragging blocks from the palette onto the canvas, then styling each one in place. Twelve block types cover Content, Layout, Media and Advanced, and every text block is a real editor on the canvas rather than a textarea hiding in a sidebar.
The Full Palette
Heading, text, image, button, divider, spacer, social, video, HTML, table, logo and columns. The HTML block is there for the moment a designer hands you markup and you would rather paste it than rebuild it.
Set the Brand Once
Accent, link, text and background colors, body and heading fonts, content width, button radius, and your logo, applied across the whole design from one panel.
An Inspector on Every Block
Four-sided padding, background, alignment, typography, and section background, plus alt text on every image with an accessibility hint next to the field.
Nothing Lost by Accident
Undo and redo, keyboard shortcuts for save and step-back, and an unsaved-changes guard before you navigate away.
Bring Your Own HTML, or Take It With You
Paste arbitrary HTML and it is sanitized into the design, or read and copy the MJML source and the compiled HTML straight out. Legacy classic templates upgrade into designer documents rather than being stranded.
The palette · twelve types
Content
Layout
Media
Advanced
Inspector · image block
Padding16 · 24 · 16 · 24
AlignmentCenter
Alt text · “Renewal summary chart”Screen readers and blocked-image clients read this
Templates Home · version history
Version history
v7 · today 10:42 · Anitacurrent
v6 · restored from v4restore
v5 · 29 Aug · Rajrestore
Gap-free numbering · a restore records itself as a new version
The Library
Save It Once, Then Actually Find It Again
You save a design as a template, and the library keeps it usable: private until you share it, filed under your own categories, favorited if you reach for it weekly, and versioned so a bad edit is never final.
Three Kinds, Named Precisely
Designer templates are built on the canvas. HTML templates are your own full email, with your CSS and Outlook conditionals preserved exactly as written. Classic templates are rich-text fragments. If you have a designer, the HTML kind is the one you want.
Private Until You Say Otherwise
Templates default to private. Share to the whole workspace when the draft is finished, not while you are still moving blocks around.
Version History You Can Restore From
An immutable snapshot is written after every content-bearing save, numbered without gaps. Restoring an old version records itself as a new one, so the history stays a record rather than a rewrite.
Categories, Snippets, Favorites, Archive
Free-text categories with filter chips, a split between reusable snippets and full templates, per-user favorites, one-click duplicate into a private draft, and a soft-delete archive for the ones you might want back.
Starters That Cannot Break
Every workspace is seeded with sales templates that can be cloned freely and never edited into uselessness, plus thirteen starter layouts in a gallery that opens itself whenever you begin a new template.
Proofing
Find the Problems While You Can Still Fix Them
You proof an email in KudosCRM by sending yourself a real one, previewing it against a real record, and reading a spam score on the draft you have not even saved. The lint is advisory and never blocks a send.
Send Yourself a Real Test
Prefilled to you and editable to any address, sent through the account you actually send from, whether that is Gmail, Outlook, IMAP-SMTP or SendGrid. The subject is prefixed with [TEST], and tracking and signature are switched off so the proof does not pollute your numbers.
Merge Behavior a Proofreader Wants
In a test, owner and organization tokens resolve against you, while contact and deal tokens show their fallback or stay visibly literal. You are checking the template, not pretending to be a customer, and the test behaves accordingly.
Preview Against a Real Record
Bind the preview to an actual deal, lead, contact or company, or work in a clearly-labeled sample context when nothing is bound. If a record cannot be resolved you get literal tokens rather than invented demo data, and preview respects record permissions, so it cannot be used to read a record you are not allowed to open.
A Lint Modeled on the Real Thing
Scored against SpamAssassin's own published rule weights and threshold, checking Gmail's clip threshold, text-to-image ratio, link shorteners and subject length. Every finding names its fix, and some fixes are one click.
It Refuses to Promise the Inbox
A clean score means nothing in your content is self-sabotaging. It does not mean the email will land, because no tool can know that, and any tool that says otherwise is selling you something.
Nothing Sends Half-Ready
A missing subject, missing content, an invalid address, or no connected sender each fail with a pointed message naming the problem, before anything leaves.
Personalization
Personalization That Fails Loudly Instead of Quietly
You personalize with {{first|there}} tokens drawn from five field families plus your organization name, and any custom field you have built is addressable too. The vocabulary is the same one your workflows and task templates already use, so there is one syntax to learn rather than three.
Tokens With Fallbacks
Write the token with a pipe and a default, and an empty first name becomes “there”. Fallbacks can be several words, so a sentence never collapses around a missing field.
Five Families and Your Org Name
Contact, company, deal, lead and owner fields, plus the sending organization's name, available anywhere in the subject or the body.
Your Custom Fields Are Tokens Too
Anything you built in Studio is addressable, so a tier, a renewal date, or an account manager you invented last week can go straight into an email.
A Picker, Not a Cheat Sheet
Searchable and grouped by module, with an inline fallback input beside each field and custom fields listed alongside the standard ones.
A Name Cannot Smuggle in Markup
Substituted values are HTML-escaped, so a contact whose name contains a tag cannot inject anything into the email you send.
Personalize · search fields
renewal
Deal
Close date{{deal.close_date}}
Custom · from Studio
Renewal tier{{renewal_tier}}
Fallback
If empty, show
your current plan
Inserts as
{{renewal_tier|your current plan}}
✓ Values HTML-escaped on substitution — a name containing a tag cannot inject markup
What the Inbox Gets, and Where Templates Actually Work
At send time a sanitizer keeps your styles, media queries, tables and Outlook conditional comments intact while stripping scripts, event handlers, and dangerous URLs and CSS — and one shared constant keeps the template, message and campaign paths in lockstep, so a design cannot be stripped on one route and survive on another. Your templates are used in six places, and we would rather name them than wave at them: bulk campaigns, sequence steps, automation send-email actions, the one-off composer, resend-to-non-openers, and the AI tools. Meeting and booking emails and support ticket replies do not use templates, so if that is what you need, this is not yet the answer.
A few other honest limits: images are referenced by URL rather than uploaded, preview is pinned to light mode, authoring is desktop-only although mobile preview is not, there is no A/B testing and no template approval workflow — and rather than claiming we inline your CSS, we will simply say MJML compiles to table-based markup Outlook understands.
How It Works
How Do You Build an Email Template in Your CRM?
Building a template takes a handful of steps, and here is what actually happens along the way.
Start From a Starter or a Blank Canvas
Thirteen starter layouts open in a gallery the moment you create a template, from welcome and newsletter through to feedback and NPS.
Drag the Blocks You Need
Twelve types across Content, Layout, Media and Advanced, edited inline on the canvas rather than in a side panel.
Set Your Brand Once
Colors, fonts, content width, button radius and logo from one panel, applied across the whole design.
Personalize With Tokens That Fail Loudly
Pick fields from the searchable picker, give each a fallback, and leave any broken token visible rather than blank.
Proof It Properly
Preview against a real record, read the deliverability lint on the unsaved draft, then mail yourself a real test through your own account.
Save, Share, and Reuse It
Save as a template, keep it private or share the workspace copy, and reuse it across campaigns, sequences, automations and one-off sends.
What's Actually in the Box
Every Builder Feature, at a Glance
True drag-and-drop canvas, keyboard accessible
Twelve block types across Content, Layout, Media and Advanced
Inline rich-text editing on the canvas itself
MJML under the hood, compiling to Outlook-safe table markup
Brand theme panel: colors, fonts, width, radius, logo
Per-block inspector with padding, background, alignment, typography
Alt text on every image, with an accessibility hint
Undo, redo, keyboard shortcuts, unsaved-changes guard
Thirteen starter layouts in a gallery that opens itself
Desktop and mobile preview in a hardened, script-free iframe
HTML import, plus MJML source and compiled HTML export
Three template kinds: designer, HTML, and classic
Private or workspace-shared visibility
Seeded sales templates that clone but never break
Categories, snippets, favorites, duplicate, and archive
Version history with gap-free numbering and restore
Templates Home with search and five scopes
Tokens with multi-word fallbacks, shared with workflows
Five token families plus your organization name
Custom Studio fields addressable as tokens
Broken tokens left visible rather than silently blanked
HTML-escaped substitution, so values cannot inject markup
Real test sends through your own connected account
Preview bound to a real record, permission-respecting
Pre-flight guards on subject, content, address and sender
Deliverability lint modeled on SpamAssassin's rule weights
Merge-field lint alongside the spam check
Preheader text as a first-class setting
Automatic plain-text part generated from the block tree
Per-template analytics over 7, 30, 90 days and all-time
Apple prefetch opens excluded from the headline open rate
Three AI tools: content block, subject and preheader, tone adjustment
AI-generated copy that preserves your merge tokens verbatim
KudosCRM Email Builder vs. a Standalone Email Designer
Build It, Proof It, Then Reuse It Everywhere
The builder is part of KudosCRM, not a separate design tool you export from.
The Template Each Industry Builds First
A viewing invitation, a renewal notice, a case update, a policy reminder, an order confirmation. Every industry has the one email it sends a hundred times, and it deserves to be built once, brand-perfect, and restored from history the day someone edits it badly.
Sends Through the Mailbox You Already Use
Test sends and real sends both go through your connected account, whether that is Gmail, Outlook, your own IMAP-SMTP server, or SendGrid, so what you proof is what your provider actually produces. The same templates feed campaigns, sequence steps, automation send-email actions, and one-off composes.
Gmail
OutlookGo Deeper
Explore More Features
The Email Builder is part of the Engage Hub. The designs you build here go out through Email Campaigns, step through Email Sequences, fire from Workflows, and report back through Email Tracking.
All FeaturesFAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Start Building
Build One Template Properly, and Reuse It for a Year
Start from a layout, set your brand once, and mail yourself the proof before anyone else reads it.