KnowBe4 provides several built-in training notifications that you can use when you enroll your users into training. If you’d like, you can customize these built-in notifications, modify our blank templates, or create your own notifications. To learn how to do this, review the steps below or check out our Customizing Training Notifications video.
To create or edit a training notification template, navigate to Training > Notification Templates. Under System Templates, you can click one of our built-in training notification templates to open it in our What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor and make changes. Saving changes to a built-in system template will save a copy of your edit to the Drafts category under My Templates.
You can also create your own training notification templates by clicking the + New Training Notification Template button in the top-right corner of the My Templates subtab.
See the screenshot and list below to learn the tools you can use to create or edit a template with the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor:
- Template Name (Optional): In this field, you can enter a name for your template. Users will not see this field when they receive the training notification email.
- Sender's Email Address: In this field, you can enter a sender's email address, which users will see in the email. You can enter any email address you’d like.
- Sender's Name (Optional): In this field, you can enter the name that will display in the email next to the sender's email address.
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Subject: In this field, enter the email’s subject line, which users will see in their inbox. This subject line will also be the title of the template if you haven't added a training notification Template Name. Here are a few examples:
- Mandatory Training Campaign
- You’ve been invited to training
- Oops, you clicked a phishing test!
- Source: You can click this button to switch to a source code view of the template. If you're familiar with HTML, you can use it to create custom training notifications.
- Image Icon: You can click this icon to add an image to your training notification template. You must use externally-hosted images, which means you must insert a publicly-available URL into the URL field after clicking the button. You can also resize your image using the height and width fields.
Note:Some versions of Microsoft Outlook will require adding additional tags to the source code of the image in order for it to display properly. See our Help! The Images in My Phishing Template Are Not Showing Up Correctly article for more information.
- Placeholder: You can use the drop-down menu to add placeholders to your notifications. The placeholder options will automatically populate certain fields with your user, account, or training information. Training campaign notification placeholders can only be used in the body of a template. See our How to Use Placeholders article for more information.
- Body: ln the body of your training notification template, add any text that you'd like. You can use the available text formatting options to customize the appearance of your template. You can also add tables, lines, and other details by clicking the buttons in the WYSIWYG editor. For more information about our body text recommendations, see below:
- The content of a training notification varies based on what information you want to give your users. At a minimum, we recommend including the training login link or an explanation of how to log in, as well as the training due date.
- If you want users to be more receptive to your email, we suggest providing a brief explanation of the training and why the user is being enrolled. Feel free to add a personal touch so that your users feel more comfortable about receiving the email.
How to Use the Blank Templates Category
Under the System Templates section, the Blank Templates category includes blank versions of our training notification templates that have a custom design or style. All of our styled templates are tagged with the words (Banner) or (Border) in the template name. You can customize the style of these templates by making edits in the source code. If you're unfamiliar with HTML, each blank template includes instructional HTML comments in the source code to help guide you through the customization process. You can also visit the W3 schools website for more information on HTML.
Listed below are some of the customizations you can make using the blank templates:
- Border (click to view): You can customize the color of the template border by adding your own RGB or hex color code.
- You can visit the W3 schools website for more information on RGB or hex color codes.
- Alternatively, you can use the [[brand_color]] placeholder within the source code. This placeholder populates the hex code of your organization's brand color set in your Account Settings.
- Banner (click to view): You can customize the background color of the banner by adding your own RGB or hex color code. Also, you can insert custom text for the banner.
- You can visit the W3 schools website for more information on RGB or hex color codes.
- Alternatively, you can use the [[brand_color]] placeholder within the source code. This placeholder populates the hex code of your organization's brand color set in your Account Settings.
- Logo: You can replace the KnowBe4 logo with your own organization's logo.
If you decide to use a blank template that has a (Logo) tag in the template name, be aware that this template will automatically populate your organization's logo using the [[company_logo_url]] placeholder. For this placeholder to work properly, you will need to add your organization's logo URL to your Account Settings. For more information about what placeholders you can use in training notifications, visit our How to Use Placeholders article.
Limitations on Uploading Your Own Images
Out of our respect for your intellectual property rights, we take steps to minimize the need for you to reproduce your copyrighted works to display them in your templates. Instead of embedding your images or uploading your images for us to host, using the linking method serves two mutually beneficial purposes. First, we provide a means for you to make more realistic templates that may help preserve the integrity and proportions of the your images that you add to your templates. Second, linking your images decreases the amount of content you have to share with us to achieve the same outcome as uploading your images to the console.