How-to guides

Draft email campaigns

An email on a Plainpaper board is the real email: subject, preheader, and the rendered HTML that will land in an inbox. Your agent drafts it, you steer it, and what you approve is the thing that ships.

What an email card is

An email card is a complete marketing email: a subject line, a preheader, and an HTML body that is the email. Open the card and you see it rendered in a safe preview; flip the card on the canvas and the actual email appears on the board. That's the point: you approve the thing that will actually land in an inbox, not a description of it.

The card holds your agent to a discipline: one final subject line rather than a list of options, and a body that contains only the email itself. Sending notes, alternatives, and commentary have no place there. If a draft needs discussion, it happens in comments.

The drafting prompt

A good email brief looks like this, filled in for our demo brand. Swap in your own board, offer, and voice:

Copy-paste prompt
On my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper, draft the announcement email for P&P Bookstore's summer sale (20% off summer reading bundles) as a complete email card in the Create phase.

- Read and apply the workspace guidelines first
- One final subject line, not a list of options
- Write the preheader to complement the subject, not repeat it
- Leave the hero image as a placeholder slot; I'll supply it

Images that don't break

Emails break when their images live somewhere fragile. Plainpaper closes that door: every image in an email is stored privately on the board itself, never hotlinked from an outside URL. Two ways to get an image in:

  • Give your agent a link. Tell it where the image lives and it fetches and stores a copy on the board.
  • Attach files yourself. Upload them to the card, then tell your agent which one goes where.

When your agent doesn't have an image yet, it leaves a labeled placeholder slot instead of inventing something. A card with an unfilled placeholder can't be approved, so the open slots double as a checklist of what you still owe. The full story is in Assets & media.

Sequences

A welcome series or a sales flow is three emails in a fixed send order. On the board, that order is a real connection: Mail 1 precedes Mail 2 precedes Mail 3. So a fresh agent session tomorrow, or next month, with no chat history at all, knows exactly what "the next email" means. It reads the chain, sees what came before, and continues it.

Copy-paste prompt
Draft a 3-mail welcome series for new P&P Bookstore subscribers as complete email cards on my "Always-on email" board: a warm hello, a look at how we pick our books, and a first-order offer. Connect them in send order (Mail 1 precedes Mail 2 precedes Mail 3) and apply the workspace guidelines throughout.

Iterating

Two ways to refine a draft, and both are safe at the same time:

  • Edit it yourself. Open the card and change the copy directly in the drawer: subject, preheader, body. Every meaningful edit keeps a version history, so nothing is ever lost to a rewrite.
  • Leave comments and let the agent make the pass. Right-click the card, add a comment per change, and hand over the batch.

You and your agent will often edit the same board at once. Plainpaper expects that, and detects conflicting edits rather than letting one silently overwrite the other.

Copy-paste prompt
Check the open comments on my "Summer sale" board, make the change each one asks for, and resolve them as you go. Where a comment is about tone, fix the whole email rather than just the sentence I pointed at.

A/B testing subjects

An A/B test lives on the board as sibling cards: the original email and a variant, linked as variants of each other, with the same body and a different subject. Later, when the numbers are in, a results card crowns the winner. The winning email moves on, the loser is archived, and the decision stays visible on the board instead of in someone's memory.

Copy-paste prompt
Take the summer sale email on my board and create one variant with a different subject line angle: curiosity instead of the offer. Link it to the original as a variant, keep the body identical, and leave both at draft until we pick a winner.

Handing off to your email platform

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Plainpaper never sends. It holds no email-platform credentials and pushes nothing. After you approve an email, your agent hands it off through your platform's own connector and takes the approved HTML and images straight from the board.

With Brevo connected, for example, the handoff is one instruction:

Copy-paste prompt
Mail 1 of the welcome series is approved. Create it as a draft campaign in Brevo: take the subject, preheader, and HTML from the card, and the images from the board's assets. Don't schedule or send anything; leave it as a draft for me to review in Brevo.

The same pattern works for Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or any platform your agent can reach. See Claude + Brevo for the full workflow, and Connect your marketing stack for wiring up the rest.