An email brief your team can sign off against.
An email brief is the one page a copywriter, designer or tool works from: the goal, audience, offer, products, lines that must appear, deadline and approver. A campaign for several markets also needs one section per market, with its offer, prices, legal line, reviewer and send time. This template has both, free to copy as plain text.
How do you use this template?
Fill in the campaign section once, then one market section for each market the email goes to. Most brief templates stop at the campaign. This one adds a section per market, and the questions a reviewer would ask.
- Copy the plain-text version below into a doc, a ticket or an email.
- Fill in the campaign section. The question under each field tells you what the field needs.
- Copy the market section once per market and fill in each copy.
- Leave a field empty when you don’t know the answer, and write “open” with the name of the person who will answer it. A guess in a brief becomes a mistake in the email.
- Send the brief to the approver when five things are filled in: the offer, the markets, the send window, the approver and the legal line for every market.
The template.
The field names and the order follow the brief in Caliber, the email production product this site is about. The questions are the ones a reviewer asks when a field is missing.
Campaign
Fill in once for the whole campaign.
- Campaign: What is the campaign called? Use the same name in your UTM tags.
- Objective: What should this email achieve? One sentence.
- Audience: Who is it for, in words?
- Segment: Who should get this email? Name the segment or list.
- Exclusions: Should anyone be left out?
- Trigger: Is this a one-off campaign or a flow? For a flow, name the event that starts it.
- Lifecycle stage: Which lifecycle stage is this for? Welcome, first purchase, repeat, at risk, win-back, VIP or member.
- Markets: Which markets is this for? Each one gets its own market section below.
- Email type: Newsletter, launch, welcome or another type your brand uses.
- Products: Which products should it show? Name or handle, twelve at most.
- Offer: Is there an offer? “No offer” is an answer. If there is one: the mechanic, the value, and whether it is a ceiling (“up to”).
- Key message: The one idea the email carries.
- Proof points: Up to three facts that back the claims.
- CTA: The button, in two to four words.
- Must-say lines: Exact lines that must appear word for word: dates, codes, names.
- Never-say lines: Words, claims or promises this email must not make.
- Tone note: How this email should sound, inside the brand’s voice guide.
- KPI: How will you judge it? Clicks, conversion or revenue per recipient.
- Comms type: Is this marketing, transactional or service?
- Send window: When does it go out? The date, and the time with its time zone.
- Deadline: When does the offer end? “None” is an answer.
- Approver: Who signs off this email? A named person, and the markets they cover.
- Constraints: Anything else that limits the email.
Per market
Copy this section once for each market.
- Market: The market’s code and name.
- Language: The language and locale the email is written in.
- Send date and time: The local date and time, with the time zone.
- Offer and prices: Any difference from the campaign offer, and every price with its currency.
- Prior 30-day price: If the email claims a reduction, the lowest price in the 30 days before it, where the market’s rules ask for one. Your legal owner confirms which markets do.
- Products available here: Products from the campaign list that this market doesn’t sell, or sells under another name.
- Legal line: Are there terms or legal lines this email must carry here?
- Must-say and never-say lines: Lines that apply in this market only.
- Local links: The market’s own shop, product and terms pages.
- Local notes: Holidays, events or habits that change the timing or the copy.
- Reviewer: The named person who reads this market’s email in its language.
- Approver: Only if different from the campaign approver.
Plain text, ready to copy.
Select the lines below and paste them wherever you write briefs. Nothing on this page is stored or sent.
Campaign:
Objective:
Audience:
Segment:
Exclusions:
Trigger:
Lifecycle stage:
Markets:
Email type:
Products:
Offer:
Key message:
Proof points:
CTA:
Must-say lines:
Never-say lines:
Tone note:
KPI:
Comms type:
Send window:
Deadline:
Approver:
Constraints:
Per market (copy once for each market)
Market:
Language:
Send date and time:
Offer and prices:
Prior 30-day price:
Products available here:
Legal line:
Must-say and never-say lines:
Local links:
Local notes:
Reviewer:
Approver:
A filled example: Holm Coffee’s Guji harvest launch.
Holm Coffee is a fictional demo brand: a roastery with three cafés and a subscription shop. Its harvest launch goes to Denmark and Sweden here. The Swedish section shows how a brief holds a line that isn’t confirmed yet.
Campaign
Example · Holm Coffee is a fictional demo brand. Prices are invented.
- Campaign: Guji harvest launch
- Objective: Announce the Guji harvest to subscribers first.
- Audience: Coffee subscribers
- Segment: Subscribers
- Exclusions: None
- Trigger: One-off campaign
- Lifecycle stage: Repeat
- Markets: DK, SE
- Email type: Harvest launch
- Products: Guji, whole bean, 250 g; Guji, filter grind, 250 g; Guji, whole bean, 1 kg
- Offer: No offer
- Key message: The Guji harvest is in. Roasted Tuesday, at your door Thursday.
- Proof points: From Hambela, washed and dried on raised beds; peach, jasmine and a long, clean finish
- CTA: Shop the harvest
- Must-say lines: Roasted Tuesday, at your door Thursday.
- Never-say lines: “artisanal” (say small-batch); “best” without proof
- Tone note: A café conversation, never a market stall.
- KPI: Revenue per recipient
- Comms type: Marketing
- Send window: 2026-11-15, 18:00 CET
- Deadline: None
- Approver: Maja Lind, Head of CRM, all markets
- Constraints: Weights in grams. The currency goes after the amount, with a space.
Market: DK
- Market: DK, Denmark
- Language: Danish (da-DK)
- Send date and time: 2026-11-15, 18:00 CET
- Offer and prices: No offer. 250 g: 129 kr. 1 kg: 449 kr.
- Prior 30-day price: Not needed. No reduction is claimed.
- Products available here: All three
- Legal line: Holm Coffee ApS · Jægersborggade 12 · 2200 København N
- Must-say and never-say lines: Free over 400 kr.
- Local links: holm.example/dk/shop/guji
- Local notes: Most orders land on Sunday evening.
- Reviewer: Maja Lind
Market: SE
- Market: SE, Sweden
- Language: Swedish (sv-SE)
- Send date and time: 2026-11-15, 18:00 CET
- Offer and prices: No offer. Prices in SEK from the Swedish price list.
- Prior 30-day price: Not needed. No reduction is claimed.
- Products available here: All three
- Legal line: Holm Coffee ApS, filial i Sverige. Open: waiting for counsel to confirm.
- Local links: holm.example/se/shop/guji
- Reviewer: Open. The brief isn’t ready until a Swedish reviewer is named.
How do you write a good email brief?
Write a good email brief by stating facts, not hopes, one field at a time, and by leaving a field open rather than guessing. The order of the template is the order a reviewer checks it in.
- Start with one idea. Holm Coffee’s guide asks “Does it say one thing?” and answers: if you need two headlines, write two emails.
- Answer the offer question. “No offer” is an answer. A blank offer field gets filled in by whoever writes the copy.
- Write exact facts exactly. Product names, prices, dates and codes go into the brief as they must appear in the email.
- Name the markets, then fill in each one. A market without its own section inherits another market’s prices and legal line.
- Choose a KPI you can measure. Clicks, conversion or revenue per recipient. Mail privacy features load emails automatically, so an open no longer means a person read the email.
- Name a person, not a team. The approver and each reviewer are people with names, and each knows which markets are theirs.
When is a brief not ready?
A brief is not ready while one of five fields is empty or still open, because each of them blocks a campaign late. The five are:
- the offer, including “No offer”;
- the lowest price in the prior 30 days, in every market where a reduction is claimed and the rules ask for it;
- the markets;
- the send window and its time zone;
- the approver.
A legal line marked as open, like Holm Coffee’s Swedish one above, is fine in a draft. It must be confirmed before the email is approved.
Where Caliber fits.
Caliber will start from a brief like this. It will ask for the fields that are missing, then prepare a draft of each market’s email for a named person to approve. Drafts go to your ESP through Caliber’s integrations with Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next, Voyado, Customer.io and Iterable.
Questions
What goes into an email campaign brief?
An email campaign brief holds the objective, the audience and segment, the offer, the products, the key message, the lines that must and must not appear, the KPI, the send window and the approver. A campaign for several markets adds one section per market, with its language, prices, legal line, local links and a named reviewer.
How long should an email brief be?
An email brief should fit on one page. Write each field as a short line, not a paragraph. Background, research and inspiration can sit in a linked document, so the brief itself stays quick to check and quick to approve.
Do you need a separate brief for each market?
No. Write one brief for the campaign and one market section for each market. Split the campaign into separate briefs only when the markets get different key messages, offers or products, because then they are different emails. A shared brief keeps the key message the same everywhere, and the market sections hold what differs.
Who should approve a marketing email?
One named person approves each marketing email, for the markets they cover. Each market also needs a reviewer who reads the email in its language. When a legal line or a price claim is involved, the brief also names who confirms it before approval.
What should you do when you don’t know a field yet?
Leave the field empty, write “open”, and name who will answer it. An open field is visible to everyone who reads the brief. A guessed field looks finished, so nobody checks it until the email is already built. Before approval, every open field is either answered or removed.