Every event in Express has an Emails tab, and it answers three questions: who your mail comes from, whether it arrived, and what it says. This article walks through all three, plus the template library that sits underneath them.

Find the Emails Tab

Start on your event's Overview page and look along the configuration strip. The Emails card tells you which sending identity this event is using, shows the address your mail will come from, and counts how many of your templates are switched on for it.

Click into it and the tab opens on Email Analytics. The panel down the left is the map for everything in this tab. Sending As is your identity. Email Program is your templates, send history and the brand kit this event uses. Needs Attention is Express telling you what it would fix first, and it's generated from your actual configuration, so it looks different on every event.

Notice the brand kit sitting in the middle of that Email Program panel. That's not decoration: every email this event sends is coloured by it. Click through and you land on the event's branding screen, the same one you'd reach from the Brand area. Change the kit there and every template preview follows automatically.

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Set Your Sender Identity

An identity is what a recipient sees in their inbox. One identity is your account default, and every event inherits it unless you deliberately override it, the same inheritance model Express uses for brand kits and report templates. From address is the technical sender. Sender name is the human one, and it's the part people read.

A few settings on this screen are worth knowing before you touch them:

1. Reply-to. Leave it as Same as from, or switch to Custom address when you want to send from a no-reply address but route replies somewhere a person is reading them.

2. Footer. Account default uses whatever your account already has. Branded template gives you a set of ready-made footers: Minimal is just your company name, Standard adds your address and an unsubscribe link, and Contact adds phone and website on top of that. Whichever you pick, your brand colours and fonts apply automatically.

3. Custom HTML. This opens a code box, and the line underneath it isn't a suggestion. Your footer HTML must contain the unsubscribe token and the address token. Those two are what keep your mail compliant with CAN-SPAM, and Express holds you to it.

Below all of that sits domain verification, and it's the part that decides whether you land in an inbox or a spam folder. DKIM signs every message so the receiving server can prove it really came from you. SPF lists which servers are allowed to send on your domain's behalf. DMARC tells the receiver what to do when one of those two fails. Your IT team sets all three up once, against your sending domain, and until they do, this identity reads as unverified. That's normal: your mail still sends, it just arrives less reliably. The used-in count at the bottom tells you how many events depend on this identity, which is your warning before you change anything under them.

Need a second sender for a different brand or region? Click New identity to set one up. A blank identity outlines From address and Sender name in red because both are required, and all three domain checks read as not yet verified until that new domain is confirmed. And if you start editing and change your mind, Express catches the unsaved change and asks before it throws anything away, so you can back out cleanly.

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Read Your Email Analytics

Back on the Analytics view, the cards across the top follow one message through its life. Sent means accepted by the delivery service. Delivered is a share of sent. Opened is a share of delivered. Clicked follows from there, and Bounced is the one worth watching, since a rising bounce rate is usually a problem with your list rather than your content. These totals roll up hourly, so if you sent something ten minutes ago, hit Refresh and give it a moment.

Underneath, Email performance breaks your total down by what happened to each message, and the Engagement funnel stacks that same journey as bars so you can see exactly where people drop out. Recent sends lists newest first, and Performance by template tells you which of your templates people open. That last one is read-only here; you change the template itself in the designer.

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Manage Your Template Library

Here's the banner that matters most in this whole tab: your templates belong to your whole account, but pinning is per event. The full library is everything your account owns. The pins decide which of those templates this event's composer will offer you. Every template starts pinned, and you trim from there.

Starter templates ship with Express. They're the same for every account, and you can't break them; editing one just creates your own copy. Each starter is a different tone rather than a different feature, Minimal for a quick confirmation, VIP for your best guests, and so on. Custom templates are anything your account has made, and every one of them started life as a copy of a starter. That's the only way they come into existence.

Pinning is fully reversible and it never touches any other event. Say this event will never need the Alert template: click its pin to switch it off, and the counter above the list drops. Alert hasn't gone anywhere, your account still owns it and every other event can still see it, it just won't be offered here. Click Pinned only to see exactly what your composer will show.

 

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Start a New Template

From Email Templates, click New template. Express doesn't drop you onto a blank page. It offers presets grouped by where they sit in your event's journey, each with a short description and how many blocks it contains.

Click any preset and the panel on the right fills in with exactly what you're getting: the description, and every block it's built from, in order. That's how you choose between them rather than guessing from a name.

There's also a Start blank option if you'd rather build from nothing. Whichever you pick, the tip underneath is worth trusting: this only opens an unsaved template, and nothing is written to your account until you press Save.

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Build and Edit Templates in the Email Designer

Open a starter and its settings sit across the top: name, a description (write it for the colleague who has to pick one template out of a long list), the subject line, and the journey stage that decides which group it sits in back in the library. The subject line supports tokens in double curly braces, so {{Event Name}} resolves per event, and it isn't optional; Express will flag any template missing one.

Read the amber line above the preview, because it's the rule that governs every starter: your edits preview live, and saving creates an editable copy on your account. The starter itself is never modified, which is why you can't break it. The preview underneath is rendered in this event's brand colours, not the template's, falling back to your account brand kit when the event hasn't set its own. Check both the Desktop and Mobile toggle before you move on. More than half of your registrants will read this on a phone, and a layout that holds together on a monitor can fall apart on a handset.

Click Blueprint to see the pieces the template is built from. A Minimal email, for example, is just a header, a text block, a button and a footer, that's all an email is here. Drag any block to reorder it, and click one to edit it. One limitation worth knowing before you build something complicated: inside a Section, blocks move up and down within their own column, but dragging between columns isn't supported yet.

Click Add block and the library is organised into three groups. Content blocks are the things that say something: text, images, buttons, accordions, carousels, social links and heroes. Layout is Section, which splits a row into columns. Structure is the furniture that holds a message together: headers, footers, dividers and spacers.

Editing a block is a single click. A Header block can be a plain logo, a brand banner, a confirmation tick, a hero image, or a slim eyebrow band. Underneath sit background, alignment and padding, and those background swatches are your own brand kit's colours rather than a generic palette.

Pick Brand banner and the preview redraws as you click: the tick becomes a solid banner in your brand colour with your organisation's name across it, with a headline field in case you want to override that name. Two flags change at the same time, the block editor marks itself edited, and the template flags unsaved changes.

Every block type gets its own editor. A Text block gives you merge-field chips along the top, first name, last name, email, organisation and more, so you can personalise without memorising token syntax. There's also a Content is HTML toggle: leave it off and your text is escaped with line breaks kept, switch it on and your markup passes through untouched.

The Button block is where the link behind your call to action lives, and it's the single most common thing people forget to change when they copy a template. And the Footer block is what renders at the bottom of the message: organisation name, mailing address, and legal or privacy text, with the same merge tokens available and its own background, alignment and padding.

When you're happy with your changes, the button in the top right on a starter reads Save a copy rather than Save, and that wording is doing real work.

Express spells out exactly what's about to happen: your copy gets added to your account, and it's pinned to this event in place of the starter. The untouched original stays available to every other event. Once you confirm, the badge flips from Starter to Custom, the button now just says Save, a delete option appears, and the amber starter warning is gone. You've got a set of starters you can't break, and as many copies of them as you need.