Customizing the email template

Last updated: May 9, 2026

Every review request email is built from a template you can customize in the BetterReviews admin. This page covers what’s editable, where, and how to preview your changes before customers see them.

Where to customize

Open Collect and click Edit template under “Request timing.” You’ll see the same kind of editor as the conversation editor — a controls panel on the left and a live preview on the right.

Screenshot of the email editor with preview — manual capture, drop in here.

Every change updates the preview in a couple of seconds.

What you can change

Upload your store’s logo (PNG, JPG, or WEBP, up to 500KB). It appears at the top of the email above the review request copy.

We recommend a horizontal logo with transparency, max 400px wide. Square or very tall logos compress awkwardly at email-client widths.

If you don’t upload a logo, the email shows your store’s first initial inside a colored circle (using your chat accent color). It’s a graceful fallback so the email still feels branded — but a real logo always reads better.

Colors

Five color fields in the Design tab:

  • Button color — the “Write a Review” button background
  • Button text — the text colour on the button
  • Background — the email’s outer background (defaults to white)
  • Heading color — the heading line (“How was your experience?”)
  • Body text — the main body colour

Click Match my store to pull colors from your Shopify theme automatically. We tell you which theme we detected and how many colors we found, then you confirm before applying — so a bad match never silently overwrites your saved colors. If your theme doesn’t expose a button color, we’ll say so and let you pick one rather than substitute body text and produce a near-black button.

The email button’s corner radius isn’t set here — it derives from the Corner style you pick in the conversation editor (capped at 12px for email-client compatibility), so chat and email stay visually consistent. If you want a specific email-only button shape, let us know — we want to hear about that constraint.

Font family

Pick from System default, Serif (Georgia), or Sans-serif (Arial). We stick to system-safe fonts because email clients have unpredictable font support — using a web font would make your email look inconsistent or broken across Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail.

Copy (Content tab)

Five editable text fields:

  • Email subject — keep it under ~50 characters. Default: {{store_name}} would love your review
  • Heading — the line above the body. Default: How was your experience?
  • Body text — the message above the button. Default: We'd love to hear about your experience with {{product_name}}.
  • Button text — the CTA. Default: Write a Review. Multi-product emails hardcode “Review Your Products” regardless of this setting.
  • Footer text — optional extra sentence above the unsubscribe footer

Placeholders use double braces: {{store_name}} and {{product_name}}. Single-brace and other placeholders (like {first_name}) are not supported.

From name

Shows up in the customer’s inbox as the sender. Default is your store name. You can change it to a person’s name (e.g. “Halden Support”) for a more personal feel.

Previewing and sending tests

Two ways to preview:

  • Live preview pane — what you see in the editor. Updates as you change values.
  • Send test email — click Send test and we’ll send the current template to your own email address. You can see exactly how it looks in a real inbox. The test email uses your real product names and includes a (Test) subject prefix so you can tell it apart.

Screenshot of the Send test email button and confirmation — manual capture, drop in here.

Send tests work with whatever template state you have loaded in the editor — you don’t need to save first. The Reply-To header is set to your store’s customer-facing Sender email (the one Shopify uses as the From address on order confirmations and other customer emails — set under Settings → Notifications in your Shopify admin). If you haven’t configured a Sender email in Shopify, BetterReviews falls back to the first address in your support-emails list (set in Settings → Review Collection in this app). If neither is set, Reply-To is omitted — customer replies in that case route to an unmonitored catch-all, so make sure at least one of those is configured.

Deliverability

We send from reviews.betterreviews.app through Resend. Each store gets a unique sender address (e.g. your-store@reviews.betterreviews.app). Our sending domain is fully authenticated (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) so emails don’t land in spam by default.

You can’t change the sender address — using our domain is required to maintain our sending reputation. Individual stores don’t have enough volume to establish a good reputation on their own, so pooling through one authenticated domain is significantly better for inbox placement.

What isn’t configurable

  • The unsubscribe footer — required by CAN-SPAM, can’t be removed.
  • The business address in the footer — BetterReviews, Inc., Cheyenne WY. This is our registered address. Because we’re the sender of record, CAN-SPAM requires our address, not yours, on every email.
  • One template per store — every customer gets the same email.

When to customize

Most stores start with the default template and tweak incrementally:

  • Day 1: upload your logo, click “Match my store” for colors
  • Week 1: check the subject line and main message, tweak to match your brand voice
  • Month 1: send yourself a test from time to time to make sure nothing’s looking broken

You don’t need to get it perfect on day one. The default template already converts reasonably well — incremental customization buys marginal gains.