Create your first email

Describe an email, refine it by chatting, check its score, and get it out — in about five minutes.

This walks through one email end to end: describing it, refining it, checking it, and getting it somewhere you can send from.

Before you start

You need an AlpacaRelay account and a workspace. Signing up creates both — you’ll be asked for your name, role, and industry along the way, which is what lets the first email land closer to your kind of business.

Nothing else needs setting up. You don’t need to connect a sending provider or add contacts to design an email.

Describe the email

1. Open New email

   Click New email at the top of the sidebar. You’ll get a prompt box: Tell me what you need, and I’ll make the email for you…

2. Say what the email is for

   Write it the way you’d explain it to a colleague. One or two sentences is plenty.

   A launch email for our new analytics dashboard. Aimed at existing
   customers on the free plan. Friendly, not salesy — one clear button
   to start a trial.
   

   If you’d rather not start from a blank box, pick one of the suggestions below it and edit from there.

3. Generate

   The email is built while you watch — structure first, then copy and styling. It costs one credit.

   When it finishes you land in the editor, with your email on the canvas and the chat beside it.

Detail in the prompt is worth more than detail in follow-ups. Who it’s going to, what you want them to do, and the tone you want are the three things that change the result most.

Already have an email you want to reuse?

Click the + button in the prompt box to Import email instead. You can upload an HTML file, paste HTML, or pull a template from a connected provider. It’s converted into an editable AlpacaRelay email — same editor, same everything from here on.

Refine it

You now have two ways to change the email, and they work on the same design.

Ask in chat

Best for anything structural or wholesale: rewriting copy, changing layout, adding a section.

Edit on the canvas

Best for the specific and small: fixing a word, nudging spacing, changing one button’s color.

Requests that work well in chat:

Make the headline shorter and punchier.
Add a three-column section for the key features.
Swap the button and the image — button first.
Use a warmer tone throughout.

Each AI change costs a credit. Editing by hand costs nothing, so for small fixes it’s both faster and cheaper to click into the text and type.

Name your colors in the prompt — “use #1F6FEB for buttons and headings” — and the design comes back closer to your look from the start. It saves a round of corrections.

The Styles panel handles the email as a whole: background color, content width, and padding. Everything else is per-block — click any element on the canvas to restyle it.

Check it before it goes anywhere

Open Quality score in the left toolbar. You get a score with the reasoning behind it, broken down across the things that actually affect whether an email works — deliverability, engagement, and how it renders across clients.

Treat the recommendations as a list to work through, not a grade to chase. Each one names a specific change, and you can ask the chat to make it: “apply the recommendation about the subject line.”

Then hit Preview and check it on both desktop and mobile. Most layout problems are only visible at phone width.

Save, and how versions work

Click Save. From then on the design is safe, and Save is also what export and sending read from — they use the last saved version, never unsaved edits on your screen.

Versions record intent rather than keystrokes:

What you do	What happens
The AI changes the email	A new version
You save a snapshot	A new version
You type, restyle, or drag	Updates the current version

That means History stays readable — a handful of meaningful states rather than hundreds of autosaves. You can switch back to any of them, and mark one as stable so it can’t be edited over by accident.

Get it out

Two paths, depending on where you send from.

Send from your existing provider

Open the dropdown next to the email’s name and choose Send to app, then Create template on your provider. The design lands in Mailchimp, Klaviyo, SendGrid, or Postmark as a template you can build a campaign from.

Change the design later and Re-sync updates the same template in place. See Integrations.

Send from AlpacaRelay

Add contacts under Audience, build a segment, then create a campaign under Campaigns. You’ll need a connected sending identity first — that’s the only prerequisite.

Just take the HTML

Export gives you the rendered HTML — download it, grab it as a zip, or copy it to the clipboard. Free workspaces get a limited number of exports.

Where to go next

Integrations

Connect the platform you send from, so designs move without copy-paste.

Square

Pull your customers and bookings in, and turn them into contacts you can email.

Troubleshooting

The result is nothing like what I asked for

Say what’s wrong in chat rather than starting over — it’s one credit either way, and the AI has the current design as context. If it’s badly off, a fresh, more specific prompt usually beats a chain of corrections.

I've run out of credits

Hand-editing, previewing, scoring, exporting, and sending all still work — only AI generation needs credits. Add more from Settings → Billing.

My changes didn't make it to my provider

Export reads the last saved version. Save, then Re-sync.

I want an earlier version back

Open History and switch to it. Nothing is deleted by switching, so you can move back and forth freely.