Templates

Templates store reusable email content. Every template has an immutable purpose:

The template hub can be filtered by purpose. Choose the purpose before choosing a built-in starter or one of your existing templates. SendLit filters choosers defensively, so a transactional template cannot be selected for a broadcast or sequence and a marketing template cannot be sent through the transactional API.

Marketing footer

Every marketing template contains one final Footer block. It displays the workspace mailing address and a recipient-specific unsubscribe link directly inside the editor preview. You can change its presentation, but cannot delete, move, duplicate, or edit its compliance content.

The address and unsubscribe URL are not stored in the template. SendLit supplies them during preview and delivery and validates the final rendered email before transport. Direct API requests cannot bypass this rule.

Transactional templates have no managed footer and cannot use address, unsubscribe_link, or subscriber.*.

Required variables

Transactional template responses include requiredVariables, a sorted list of the unguarded Liquid paths discovered from the content:

{
    "purpose": "transactional",
    "requiredVariables": ["customer.name", "otp"]
}

Defaults and inactive guarded branches are optional:

Hello {{ customer.name }}.
{{ company | default: "Acme" }}
{% if promotion %}{{ promotion.code }}{% endif %}

Built-in transactional starters additionally expose descriptions and example values through variableDefinitions. Runtime discovery remains authoritative.

Duplicate and convert

Purpose cannot be changed in place. Use Duplicate as transactional or Duplicate as marketing:

• Transactional to marketing preserves the content and appends the managed footer.
• Marketing to transactional removes only the managed footer. If ordinary content still references subscriber, address, or unsubscribe_link, the conversion is rejected without creating a partial copy.

The original template and historical rendered email snapshots are unchanged.

Built-in starters

SendLit provides marketing starters and transactional starters for OTPs, magic links, password resets, verification, invitations, receipts, payment confirmations, security alerts, and blank transactional designs. Built-in templates are starters: duplicate one into a team-owned tpl_ template before using it with POST /emails.