Can I design my marketing emails in Claude Design?
If you already use Claude Design for your website, you can design your marketing emails there too. It is the same loop as Can I edit my site in Claude Design and push the changes back?: Claude reads what you have, designs something, shows it to you, and nothing is saved until you say so.
The prompt
“Design me an email template for my newsletter. Use my own colours and my own photos from the site, keep it to one column, and show me what it will look like before you save anything.”
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What to ask for
Ask for an email template rather than a one-off email. A template is a design you keep and reuse, with the changing parts - a date, a headline, a link - marked as things you fill in each time. A one-off beautiful email is simply a template you use once.
What Claude has to work within
An email is not a web page, and the rules are much tighter. There are no stylesheets and no web fonts, layout is done with tables, and anything interactive is refused outright. bernard holds a connected design tool to those rules rather than letting it hand you something that looks wonderful on a screen and falls apart in a real inbox.
Two rules are worth knowing because they change what you should ask for:
- Pictures must already be published on your site. An email fetches its pictures from your live website when the reader opens it, so a photo sitting in your draft would arrive broken - for ever, in an email you cannot recall. bernard checks this before saving and refuses if something is not live yet.
- There is a size limit, and it is not arbitrary. Gmail hides the end of a long email behind a “message clipped” link - and the unsubscribe line is at the very end. Being told the design is too long is bernard protecting your reader’s ability to leave.
What is never the design’s
The unsubscribe line is bernard’s. It sits below whatever has been designed, it always carries a working unsubscribe link and a link to email preferences, and no design tool can remove it, move it or reword it. It does now take on your own colours and typeface, so it sits under your design rather than looking like a mistake.
The link back to your website stays too - it is how somebody who has forgotten who you are finds out. The one piece of bernard’s own furniture a design can remove is the plain business name printed above it, which exists only because bernard’s own simple templates have no logo of their own. If your design already opens with your name, ask Claude to switch that line off.
Before you agree
Claude should show you the finished email and tell you plainly if saving it means that template leaves the simple editor behind. If it did not say, ask. The trade-off is real but small, it only affects the one template, and it is your call either way.
Then send yourself a test before any real send. A preview shows the layout; only a real email in a real inbox shows you the email.
Questions people ask
- Will the unsubscribe link still work if the design is not bernard’s?
- Yes, always. The unsubscribe line is bernard’s, not the design’s. It is added underneath whatever has been designed, it carries the real unsubscribe link and the preferences link, and nothing a design tool writes can move it, change it or remove it. That is on purpose: it is the part of a marketing email the law is about, so it is not something anybody gets to redesign. What did change in September 2026 is that it now picks up your own colours and typeface, so it looks like it belongs under your design instead of looking like something went wrong.
- What do I lose by having a designed template?
- Two things, and only on that one template. You will edit it as HTML from then on rather than in the simple editor, because bernard will not flatten somebody’s design by opening it in a plain text box. And bernard stops painting your site’s colours into it when you restyle your site, because the design already brought its own colours. Every other template you have is unaffected. Claude should tell you both of these before it saves anything - if it did not, ask it to show you again before you agree.
- Can it use my photos?
- Yes, as long as they are already published on your site. A picture in an email is fetched from your live website when somebody opens the message, which might be months later, so a photo that is only in your draft would arrive broken - and once an email is sent there is no way to fix it. bernard checks every picture before it saves the template and refuses if one is not live yet. If that happens, publish your site and ask again.
- Will it look right in everybody’s email app?
- Mostly, and the design is built for that. Email apps are much stricter than web browsers: there are no stylesheets, no web fonts, and layout is done the old-fashioned way. bernard holds a design tool to those rules rather than letting it design something pretty that falls apart in Outlook. Send yourself a test before a real send anyway - that is the only way to see a real inbox.
- Does designing one send anything?
- No. A template is a design you keep; it has no audience and no send button. When you want to use it, start a campaign from it, fill in the parts that change, and the campaign still needs its own separate approval before anybody receives it.
- Do I have to use Claude Design for this?
- Not at all. Bernard designs templates for you inside bernard - in Your customers, Templates, choose Design one with Bernard - and every site starts with six of his own. This article is for people who already work in Claude Design and would rather design the email there.