By setting up custom email templates, you can customize the emails sent to you, your team, and your form submitters.
Why use custom email templates?
Whenever you enable email notifications in your form, Formaloo offers default email templates that include the full submission data in a simple format.
However, you can take it a step further by creating custom email templates to make your messages fully branded, dynamic, and tailored to your workflow. For example:
Get clear, concise new submission notifications, only featuring the details that matter to your team,
Deliver personalized and branded follow-up emails to respondents,
Automatically include calculated results, quotes, or dynamic summaries,
Use AI-generated content to make each message hyper-personalized, unique, and human-like.
💡 Let's say you’re running a project or service request form with custom proposal generation. You can send a dynamic, branded confirmation email that:
Greets the person by name,
Shows a summary of the services and add-ons they selected,
Displays the estimated price calculated in your form based on their selections,
Includes a custom proposal PDF,
All without manual editing!
Step 1: How to create a custom email template
You can create custom email templates from your dashboard by clicking on your Profile icon and going to Apps & Integrations → Email Templates.
From here, you can create, edit, duplicate, or delete your templates anytime. Click +Add new template to create a new one:
ℹ️ You can also create a new template on the go, directly from the form editor:
In the Notify tab, when setting up notifications,
Or in Advanced Logic, when setting up Send email rules:
Step 2: How to personalize your custom email templates
Once your new template is created, you can fully customize its content and layout.
🎨 Customize and brand the content in the email
Add your logo, sections, tables, and custom formatting:
💡 Learn more: How to add your logo to custom email templates
🪄 Personalize the email content with form data
Use answer piping to pull data directly from the form into the email.
Assign an ID to all necessary fields or variables in your form. Then reference fields' or variables' values in your template using @ followed by the field ID. For example:
"Hi @name," → would replace
@namewith the person’s name entered in the field with IDname,"Branding assets: @assets" → can display all the selected options in the field with ID
assets,"Brand personality: @personality" → can pull in the user's input from a text field with ID
personality,"Total estimated project cost: @branding_estimate" → can show a calculated value of the variable with ID
branding_estimate:
💡 Learn more: How to display form data in custom email templates
🤖 Use AI to generate hyper-personalized, dynamic messages
Inside your custom email template, you can add an AI box by clicking on the AI Email Assistant from the formatting menu.
This allows you to write a prompt for AI to generate a custom message for each respondent, based on your instructions and tailored to their input:
ℹ️ To personalize the AI output, you can use answer piping the same way – to pull in the form data and use it in your prompt.
You can also use the system variable @answered to pass all answered fields (both questions and responses) to the AI at once. For example:
Add a line in your prompt like: “The person named @name has completed a quiz to discover their skin type. The questions and their answers: @answered” – this will let AI analyze all quiz questions and answers together.
The AI box will be replaced with a personalized, AI-generated message upon sending each email using given template – making your messages more relevant and human-like.
Step 3: How to adjust your custom email templates' settings
Every email template has a set of basic settings you can configure:
Template name – to easily identify your templates when assigning them in forms or logic,
Active/Inactive toggle – to enable or disable any template,
Email subject – can include static text or simple values pulled from the form using answer piping (e.g.,
🎨 Your branding proposal is ready, @name!),Sender name, Reply-to email, and BCC – personalize who the email appears to come from and where the copies or replies land:
ℹ️ You can pipe simple field values into these settings (e.g., adding @name or @form_title to the Email subject). Complex fields such as linked rows, repeating sections, etc. are not supported at this time.
📮 Choose the email server
By default, emails are sent via Formaloo’s email server. Optionally, you can connect your own SMTP server to send from your custom domain, and then set it to be used in any custom email template:
Using your own SMTP:
Helps match your brand’s sender address,
Removes Formaloo’s sending limits,
Lets you manage deliverability fully from your mail provider.
💡 Learn more: How to set up custom SMTP for your custom emails
📄 Attach custom PDFs
You can choose whether your custom email should include a PDF attachment (just a default copy of the submission, or a completely custom, branded document).
At the very bottom of the email template settings, enable the Attach PDF toggle, and select which PDF template should be used, or create a new one:
A PDF will be generated dynamically for each submission using the selected PDF template and sent along with your email.
Example use cases:
Send a signed agreement copy to both parties,
Attach a personalized project proposal, quote, or invoice,
Include a generated course completion certificate, event ticket, etc.
💡 Learn more: How to generate and send custom PDFs with your emails
Step 4: How to set up your custom email templates in your forms
Once your custom email template is created and activated, you can assign it to a specific form so it’s used when sending notifications:
Open your form in the Editor and go to the Notify tab,
Under Receive email notifications or Send email to respondents, enable the notifications,
From the dropdown menu, select your preferred custom email template:
You can also choose a custom template in your Advanced Logic rules. When setting a rule to send an email, simply select the custom email template you want to use for that condition:
Step 5: How to connect your SMTP (optional)
This step is optional, but highly recommended if you’d like to send emails from your own address or domain.
ℹ️ Formaloo server vs. your SMTP server
If you use the Formaloo email server, your emails are handled automatically with guaranteed delivery. Each workspace starts with an hourly quota of about 50 emails, which adjusts based on your sender reputation. Avoid hard bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints, or very low open rates to keep your quota high. When you hit the limit, emails will queue and be sent once your quota resets.
Using Formaloo’s server is free during the beta program – just make sure your messages are transactional and not spam.
If you prefer to use your own SMTP server, all emails from that template will be sent directly via your connected mail server. This method has no Formaloo limits or reports but depends entirely on your SMTP configuration and deliverability.
Benefits of using a custom SMTP:
Send emails from your verified company domain,
Improve deliverability and sender reputation,
Control sending limits and authentication directly on your mail server.
To set it up:
Go to your Profile → Apps & Integrations → Email Templates,
Click SMTP Settings, and enter your SMTP server details (host, port, username, password, encryption type),
Save the settings to connect your mail server – now, you can pick it under Email Server in any custom email template:
💡 Learn more: How to set up custom SMTP for your custom emails
*️⃣ How to send conditional or on-update email notifications
Remember that you don’t need to send every email on every submission. You can use conditional logic to send different follow-ups depending on the user’s input.
💡 Learn more: How to send and receive conditional email notifications
You can also trigger email notifications on update – for example, when your team changes a submission’s status or when a user adds new information to their older submission. This allows you to send automatic follow-ups to respondents or notify your team when something changes.
💡 Learn more: What's On Update logic, and how it works
Bottom line
With Formaloo’s custom email templates, you can go beyond standard notifications.
Create fully branded and dynamic messages, use AI to personalize them, attach custom PDFs, and send them automatically based on your workflows.
Whether you’re confirming submissions, sending quotes, or keeping team members in the loop – your emails can now match your brand and flow perfectly.