Formatting emails

Use this guide to write email message templates. To check formatting, send yourself a message before sending to recipients.

You can also send messages with custom content.

Titles

To add a title to your message, use the number sign (#) followed by a space. To add a subtitle, use two number signs (##) followed by a space. For example:

Bold and italic

To add bold, use two asterisks (**) on each side of your text. To add italic, use underscores (_) on each side of your text. For example:

Sections

To separate the message into sections, use three underscores (_ _ _) to create a horizontal line. For example:

Section 1
---
Section 2

Bulleted lists

To add bullet points, use asterisks (*) followed by a space. Bullet points help recipients identify important information quickly. For example:

Numbered lists

In front of each item in a list, insert the number followed by a period and a space. If you want GC Notify to number the list for you, insert the number 1 in front of each item.

If you start a new list later in your template, insert 1 in front of each item again.

Multi-level numbered lists

GC Notify supports up to 5 levels of nested lists. 

To nest a list, insert three spaces in front of each list item. For example, insert three spaces to create a second level list, and six spaces to create a third level list.

1. First level
1. First level
   1. Second level
   1. Second level
   1. Second level
      1. Third level
      1. Third level
         1. Fourth level
         1. Fourth level
            1. Fifth level
            1. Fifth level

Block format

To add a vertical grey bar to the side of text, use a caret (^) followed by a space in front of the text. For example:

Links

To include a link, add the full URL (starting with https://) and it will become a clickable hyperlink. For example:

To embed a link in your message, use square brackets around descriptive text, followed by round brackets around the URL. Make sure links make sense out of context (avoid “click here”). For example:

To include a personalised link in your message, use double round brackets around the personalised link, as you would for a variable. To embed a personalised link, use square brackets around the descriptive text, followed by triple round brackets around the variable link.

Language attribute tags

Language tags help make bilingual emails more accessible by indicating how content should be read by a screenreader. Use [[en]] on the line before English text and [[/en]] on the line following English text. Use [[fr]] on the line before French text and [[/fr]] after on the line following French text.