Condolence Letter

What are letter templates?

Letter templates are pre-made formats or layouts to help you draft a letter — no matter what your specific needs. With a letter template, you can just fill in fields like date, sender and recipient addresses, greeting, body text, and signature. These templates help you minimize busywork while producing professional results.

The best part? You won’t have to write each letter from scratch, and you can reuse templates as many times as you need, changing the letter for each circumstance.

Subtypes of letter templates

There are many different types of letter templates. While you can customize letter templates to your exact needs, you can also use our ready-made templates as is.

One common letter template is for a job promotion letter, which is a formal correspondence used to offer an employee a promotion, raise, or new role within a company. These templates can save your HR department time drafting individual promotion letters, so all they have to do is fill in an employee’s salary and job specifics to create a perfect letter. Job promotion letters provide a formal way to inform the employee of their new position, convey the details of their new role, and celebrate their accomplishments.

Another common letter template is a letter of recommendation. A letter of recommendation vouches for an individual based on a person’s first-hand experience of their characteristics and qualifications. Whether you’re an employer or a teacher, you’ve most likely received multiple requests to write letters of recommendation on top of your regular workload. Instead of spending valuable time drafting new letters from scratch, you can customize a template to create letters of recommendation in minutes. You can even set up an autoresponder email that sends the individual their completed letter of recommendation once you’ve finished.

Another common letter template type is for a resignation letter, which is an official document that notifies an employer when an employee is leaving their job. These templates work great for anyone who is planning to resign from their current position or for HR teams that need to offboard employees. You can personalize the template with your reasons for resigning from a job, then send it as a PDF in seconds.

Key elements of letter templates

Letter templates are structured to accommodate specific formatting and layout needs. The key fields to include are

• Header: The title or purpose of your letter
• Date: The date the letter is being sent
• Sender name: The full name of the person sending the letter
• Email: The email of the person sending the letter
• Phone number: The contact phone number of the person sending the letter
• Sender and recipient addresses: The full addresses of both the person sending the letter and the person receiving the letter
• Greeting: A formal salutation to the person receiving the letter
• Body text: The bulk text of the letter stating its purpose, whether that be for a resignation, a promotion, an appraisal, etc.
• Signature and signoff: The signature of the person sending the letter, followed by an optional field for their printed name and the date of signing

How do I create a letter with Jotform?

You can create a letter with Jotform in minutes using our ready-made templates. Navigate to Letter Templates in our PDF template directory, and select one that best suits your needs. Then, use our intuitive drag-and-drop builder to customize the letter design with elements of your personal branding, different fonts and colors, and so much more.

When the letter template looks perfect, you can fill out the fields for the specific recipient and purpose of the letter, then share it via email, link, or QR code. With Jotform Sign, you can also collect signatures from recipients and save your letter as PDF instantly for future reference. It’s that easy!

What can I use a letter for?

You can use a letter any time you need to convey a formal or informal message to a person or organization. Letters are useful for making requests, providing information, expressing gratitude, extending invitations, submitting applications or proposals, offering promotions or opportunities, giving condolences, and addressing issues or disputes.

On the personal side, letters are used to correspond with friends and family, send invitations to parties, and more. In business, letters are more commonly used to communicate with partners, clients, customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders. They are also used to establish business agreements, initiate contracts, and inform recipients of legal actions, among other purposes.

Letters are one of the oldest and most effective means of written communication, and they are still used by just about every institution and industry today. As such, it’s useful to know how to use them effectively and efficiently.