How to Upload an Email Template in Sendy.co

How to Upload an Email Template in Sendy

In this guide, you'll learn how to bring a Postcards email template into Sendy.co. Since Sendy is self-hosted and doesn't connect to Postcards through a built-in integration, the process is a quick manual one: you'll export your template from Postcards and paste it into a new Sendy template.

We'll also cover how to add Sendy's personalization tags (like the recipient's name and the unsubscribe link) so your emails feel personal and stay compliant. These are added inside Postcards before exporting.

Prerequisites

A Postcards account
A working Sendy installation that's already set up and running
A finished email template in Postcards, ready to export
(Optional) A text editor like VS Code, Sublime Text, or Notepad to open the HTML file

Step 1: Add Sendy tags inside Postcards

Sendy's personalization tags are small placeholders that get swapped out with each recipient's own information when a campaign is sent. So instead of every subscriber seeing a generic "Hi there," they can see their own name, and your footer can include a working unsubscribe link.

Sendy's tags are wrapped in square brackets and usually include a fallback value, like [Name,fallback=there] . When the campaign goes out, Sendy replaces the tag with the subscriber's real data or shows the fallback text if that field is empty for them. You can find the full list of available tags at the bottom of the template editor page inside Sendy.

For this guide we'll use two common ones:

[Name,fallback=there] — personalizes the greeting with the subscriber's name
[unsubscribe] — inserts the unsubscribe link (a built-in Sendy tag)

To add a tag in Postcards, open your template in the editor and click the text element where you want it to appear, or add a new text element if needed. Type or paste the tag exactly as written, including the square brackets. You can place it inline with regular text, for example: Hey [Name,fallback=there], thanks for subscribing!

For the unsubscribe link, it's best to add [unsubscribe] as a hyperlink rather than plain text, so subscribers see a clean "Unsubscribe" word instead of a long raw URL. To do this:

Type the word "Unsubscribe" in your footer, usually in the text element where your footer links live.
Highlight it and click the link icon above the text.

In the URL field, paste [unsubscribe] and apply the link.

One thing worth knowing before you test later: Sendy only fills in personalization tags when you send a real campaign to a list. If you use Sendy's test-send option, the tags will show their fallback values instead of real subscriber data, so don't worry if a test email shows "there" instead of a name.

Once your tags are in place, you're ready to export the template.

Step 2: Export your template from Postcards

Once your template is ready in Postcards, you'll need its HTML code. There are two quick ways to get it:

Copy email code: In the Postcards editor, click Export in the top right corner and select Copy Email Code. This copies the full HTML straight to your clipboard.

Download as ZIP: Click Export > Download as ZIP, and make sure Host images/fonts online is toggled on.

Extract the the index.html from the ZIP to a folder

Open the index.html file in your text editor, and copy the entire code.

Either method works. The Host images/fonts online option matters here, with it enabled, your images load from absolute URLs hosted by Postcards, so they'll display correctly in your emails without uploading anything to Sendy.

Step 3: Import the code into Sendy

Now we'll create a new template in Sendy and drop your Postcards code into it.

From your Sendy dashboard, head to the panel on the right and click All templates.

Then click Create a new template.

You'll land on the Create template page with a name field, a plain text version field, and an HTML code editor on the right.

To paste your Postcards code, click the Source button in the top-left of the editor's toolbar, this switches the editor from its visual mode to raw HTML view, which is what you need for a Postcards template.

You'll see some placeholder HTML already in the editor. Select all of that placeholder code, delete it, and paste your Postcards HTML in its place.

Once your code is in, give your template a name in the field on the left so you can find it later. If you'd like, you can also add a plain text version of your email in the text area below, this is shown to recipients whose email clients don't support HTML, and including it can help with deliverability. It's optional, though.

Finally, click Save template at the bottom left. Your Postcards design is now saved in Sendy as a reusable template, ready to be selected the next time you create a campaign.

What we covered

How to add Sendy personalization tags inside Postcards before exporting.
How to export your Postcards template as HTML or copy the email code.
How to create a new template in Sendy and paste in your Postcards code using the Source editor.