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The idea of a Design Template in Shaman is to save you some time, maintain compliance and consistency across your email content as well as facilitate the sharing of content across Products/Brands and even franchises. As the name suggests, it is a template which you can use as a base and then add more specific text, images or links in line with your objective.

A Design Template can be a Fragment/ Dynamic content, Insertable block, or Template. (You can not make a Design Template for a template fragment).

The Design Template only exists in Shaman (as in, there will be no trace of the design template in your Veeva Vault).

You need special permission to have access to create and edit the master Design Templates in your account. This is to help conserve the accuracy and consistency of your Design Templates. If you have any questions or doubts about the Design Templates available to you, please contact us at support@getshaman.com

From the email overview in the email editor, click the tab “Design Templates”.

You will be directed to an overview of all Design Templates in your account. In the overview, you can see the name of the Design Template, the Product associated with it (or “All” if available to use with all products), the type of template it is (eg. a Template, Fragment/ Dynamic content or Insertable block) and its status.

As Design Templates are only used in Shaman (not in Veeva/ OnCore Vault), there are two possible statuses: draft, or live.

Good to know!

When a Design Template is in draft status, it will not be visible in the Design Template gallery that appears when creating new email content. To make the Design Template available in the gallery, you need to set it to live. We will take a look at how to do that later on in the article.

To begin creating a new Design Template, click the “New” button in the top right corner of the screen. You will then be redirected to a page where you can complete key information such as the name of the template, what type of email it is, and whether it should be assigned to one Product in particular (or across all products).

To begin working on the content in your Design Template, click on “Design”.

Before being directed to the email editor, your Design Template gallery will appear. Here you will be able to see all available Design Templates for the type of content you are creating (relating to the Product/Brand you are working with, and which work area or franchise if applicable).

You can either select a Design Template or if you want a completely blank canvas, click the "start without template" button in the top right corner. You will then be redirected to a blank canvas in the email editor to start building your email content.

You may want to take a look at these articles for more information on how to add images, buttons, text, and other types of content.

Once you have finished creating the Design Template, click “Done”. You will then be redirected to the Design Template details page, where you will see the option:

Click the "Set to live" button to activate the Design Template for all users in your account.

Good to know!

You can deactivate a Design Template so that it will no longer be visible to users by clicking the "Set back to draft" button (which will be visible to select once the Design Template has been set to live).

In the next section, we will take a closer look at locking content in the Design Templates.

Let´s take a closer look!

Imagine that you have a brand header image which you do not want to be edited, moved, or deleted by anyone using this Design Template as a base for their email content. In Shaman you can now easily and quickly configure the editing permissions on each content element in a Design Template, increasing brand consistency and compliancy in your email content.

It is possible to "lock" parts of the Design Template, preventing them from being selected, dragged to a different position, duplicated, deleted, or hidden by anyone using the specific Design Template in the future.

You may have noticed when creating Design Templates in Shaman, if you click on a content element or row (for example an image, text, button, etc), some additional options will appear in the content menu on the right hand side.

The options available to configure are:

Very good to know!

The editing permission toggles need to be configured on both the content element and the row of the content element. You can select the row of the content element by clicking the background of the email canvas (the two spaces on either side of the email canvas) next to the content element. The content element can be selected by clicking on it directly.

Let´s take a look at an example.

In this Design Template, we have removed the permission to select, duplicate, or delete the header image (as per screenshot).

Now if we select the Design Template to use as the base for an email design, we will not be able to select, duplicate, or delete this image in the new email template created.

Take a look at this short video to see the process of configuring Design Template permissions in full.

With Design Template versions in Shaman, you can see the full story of all versions previously created for a specific Design Template at a glance. You have complete visibility on what is happening with your email content and can effortlessly keep track or revert back to any previously saved versions, giving you further freedom (and peace of mind!) in the content creation process.

Each time a Design Template is edited and saved by you or a member of your team, in the HTML editor by clicking “Done”, Shaman will save a new version of the Design Template.

You can find all previous versions of a Design Template by scrolling down to the "History" section from the overview menu:

The following information is available to view:

Good to know!

If you have only saved your Design Template once, you will not yet be able to view or revert back to previous versions, as only one version (the current version) of the email content exists.

Once you have multiple versions of a Design Template in Shaman, you will see multiple options available in the "Design change history" list.

To preview a version, click “View and revert” in the corresponding row of the version you wish to view.

You will then be presented with the current version of your email content on the left and the previous version you are choosing to view on the right. From here, you have three options:

Simply click the "Publish latest version" in the "Template Status" section of the overview page of the Design Template to publish latest version. You can then work on the design and create new drafts, and only replace the existing design by either setting it back to draft or putting a newer version to live.

And that's it! Time to enjoy the new freedom and security of working with Email Versions History in Shaman.

From the email overview page which shows all Design Templates currently created in your account, find the design template you wish to duplicate or delete and click the three dot menu as per the screenshot below.

You will now see the following options:

To duplicate a Design Template, select the option "Duplicate". A copy will be generated and the email details page of this copy will open automatically.

You can edit the email details of the Design Template, or click the "Design" tab to edit the copy of the Design Template, or click "Set to live" to allow all users create email content using this selected template.

To delete a Design Template, select the option "Delete". A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm that you would like to delete this email content.

Good to know!

It is not possible to recover deleted content in Shaman, so make sure that you definitely do not need the Design Template before deleting it.

If you are sure you want to proceed, click "OK".

The selected Design Template has now been deleted.
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