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Writing the message recipients receive
The subject line and note that arrive with your document, and what to say.
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Two things decide what your recipients read. Subject becomes the subject line of their email and is set on step one, beside your documents. Message is your covering note, and you write it on the last step, Review and send, inside a preview of the email exactly as it will arrive.
An envelope is the document you sent for signature, together with everyone who has to act on it.
The subject line
Your subject arrives in their inbox as Please sign: followed by whatever you typed. So a subject of "Engagement letter 2026/27" lands as Please sign: Engagement letter 2026/27.
Write it for someone who was not expecting it:
- Name the document, not the task. "Engagement letter 2026/27" beats "Please sign this".
- Say who it is from if the reader might not recognise your address. "Smith & Co engagement letter" is one line and removes all doubt.
- Keep it under about eight words, because a phone truncates the rest.
- Avoid a reference only you understand. "ENG-4471-B" tells the client nothing and looks like spam.
The same subject is what you will search on later, in Search by subject or recipient on the Envelopes list, so a subject that reads well in an inbox also reads well in your own records six months on.
The covering note
The message is optional, and a good one earns its place. It appears in a quoted block headed with your name, so it reads as a note from a person rather than as system text.
You write it on Review and send, in the email itself. What you see on that screen is the email your recipient receives, rendered by the same thing that sends it, so there is nothing to imagine. If more than one person is being emailed, a selector above the preview lets you check each of them in turn: everyone gets their own links, so no two are quite identical.
Nothing is sent while you are looking at it, and the links in the preview do not work yet, because the signing links do not exist until you press send.
Three sentences is usually enough:
Hello Sarah, here is our engagement letter for the coming year, unchanged from last year apart from the fee on page two. Signing takes about a minute and there is nothing to print. Any questions, call me on the usual number.
What is worth including:
- What the document is, in one clause.
- What has changed, if they have seen a version before. This is the sentence that saves the most time on both sides.
- How long it takes, because "this will take a minute" gets documents opened.
- How to reach you, so a question comes to you rather than becoming a delay.
What to leave out: an access code, if you have set one. Send that by another route, or it defeats the point of having one.
What the email looks like
The recipient sees a heading naming you, their name, the document title, your message if you wrote one, and a button reading Review & Sign Document. A line underneath says when the request expires. Below that is the same link in plain text, for anyone whose email client will not show the button.
If your account has branding set up, your logo and your colour appear on it.
Changing it before you send
The Review step shows everything as it will go out, and Subject can still be edited there without walking back through the wizard. Read the subject line one last time on that screen. It is the part everyone sees and the part that decides whether the document gets opened today or next week.
After it has gone
The subject and the message are part of the sent envelope and stay as they were. If you need to correct something in either, void the envelope and send a fresh one, which also gives your recipient a single unambiguous copy to act on. See Cancel an envelope someone has already opened.
If a recipient says the email looks odd
Ask them to check whether their email client is blocking images, which is the usual cause of a message that arrives looking bare. The plain text link at the foot always works, so they can sign from that whatever their settings.