Documentation

What your emails look like

Two styles, your brand, and what you can put in an email.

Every email Kicklace sends for you is the same thing underneath: plain words you wrote, drawn in one of your two styles. There's no drag-and-drop builder, on purpose. An email that reads like a letter lands in more inboxes than a designed one.

Your two styles

Both live under Settings → Styles, and each email picks one.

Plain is a letter. No header, links stay links, and your sign-off in lines.
Letterhead puts your logo at the top and centres the sign-off.

Both are made from your brand: your logo, your name, three colours (the accent, the words and the paper), your postal address and your social profiles. Each style also has a few choices of its own: the typeface, the size and spacing of the words, what sits at the top, whether a link alone on its line becomes a button, how the signature is laid out, and where the footer sits. The preview beside them is the real email, redrawn as you change it.

Your brand can come from your website. Paste its address and press Make both from my site. Kicklace reads your home page for your logo, your colours and your typeface, and makes both styles from them. Nothing changes until you press Keep.

Kicklace checks that your words can be read on your paper, and won't keep a style where they can't.

Writing an email

An email on your Lifecycle map opens on a screen of its own, drawn as it will arrive. Pick Plain or Letterhead from its Style menu, write, and switch to Preview to see exactly what a send would draw.

⌘B, ⌘I and ⌘K (Ctrl on Windows) are bold, italic and a link. The writer's menus put in a heading, a variable, a picture, a list, a divider, or a Join button for one of your lists. A link alone on its line becomes a button, where your style says so.

The markup

Underneath, an email is plain text with a few marks that mean something. The writer puts them in for you, but you can type them too.

You write	You get
A blank line between two lines	Two paragraphs
`# A heading`	A heading
`- One thing` on each line	A bulleted list
`important`	important
`gently`	gently
`[the guide](https://example.com/guide)`	A link
`[Start here](https://example.com/start)` alone on its line	A button
`![The new hinge](https://example.com/hinge.png)`	A picture
`---` alone on a line	A divider
`> One thing` on each line	A quiet aside
`!hero(https://example.com/shop.jpg)` on the first line	A picture across the top

A bare address like https://example.com becomes a link too. A stray asterisk is just an asterisk.

Pictures

![caption](https://…) puts a picture in. It's never wider than the email, so a phone never has to scroll sideways. The caption is what somebody sees when their mail app blocks pictures, and what a screen reader says, so write what the picture shows.

The address has to start with https://. The picture isn't carried inside the email; the email points at it, so if that address stops working, the picture stops showing.

Variables

A variable is written {{like_this}} and filled in for each person as the email goes out. Type {{ in the writer for a menu of the ones your workspace can fill.

Variable	What it stands for
`{{first_name}}`	Their first name, or "there"
`{{name}}`	Their full name, or "there"
`{{email}}`	Their email address
`{{phone}}`, `{{title}}`, …	Any field on a person, by its key
`{{organization}}`	The organization they belong to
`{{signature}}`	Your sign-off, as a short plain line

Somebody Kicklace knows only by their email is greeted as "there", never by their address. A variable nothing can fill comes out empty. Nobody ever gets an email that says {{phone}}.

An email on your map can also carry a variable that fills itself when it sends, like what shipped this week or what that one person did. The Lifecycle has those.

Your signature

One signature for the workspace, under Settings → Styles → Signature: your sign-off (written, in a handwriting face, or a picture of your own handwriting), a picture beside your name, your role, your phone, email and website, a few links and buttons. It goes at the end of an email, before the footer, and each email says whether it carries it.

What was really sent

Every email that leaves is kept exactly as it went out: the subject, the designed version, the plain-text version, who it went to and what sent it. The line on a person's record opens it. A test you send yourself isn't kept, because nobody received it.

Kicklace's own emails

Your sign-in link, a password reset, an invitation, a note Kicklace sends you: those come from Kicklace, with its own name at the top, and carry no list, no unsubscribe link and no signature.