Migrate email templates using Knock's MCP server

Learn how to quickly migrate your email templates to Knock using our MCP server.

Storing your email templates in Knock comes with many advantages. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through how to leverage Knock's MCP server with the large language model (LLM) of your choice as a low-effort solution to quickly migrate your email templates to Knock.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, you'll need access to the following:

A Knock account.
A configured email provider in your Knock account. Navigate to Integrations > Channels in your dashboard to set this up if you haven't already done so.
A service token for your Knock account.
An MCP-compatible client (such as Cursor or Claude Desktop). We recommend Cursor for working with a large collection of HTML files.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will assume that you're familiar with prompting an agentic LLM and understand how to provide access to files as context for your prompts. If you're not sure what this means, we recommend checking out this guide on working with context from Cursor.
Your existing email template files. Your templates will be upserted to Knock as HTML, so if you're using a format like MJML or React Email, you'll want to convert them to HTML before you begin.

For more information on setting up the Knock MCP server, see the Get started section of the MCP documentation.

Required MCP tools

When working with MCP servers, it's recommended that you expose only the tools you need for your use case to your LLM. The steps in this tutorial will require access to the following tools:

documentation.*
channels.*
commits.*
emailLayouts.*
partials.*
workflows.*
users.*

Learn more about configuring these tools in your MCP-compatible client here. If you're using Cursor or Claude Desktop, you can simply copy and paste the relevant configuration below into your MCP settings, under the mcpServers key. Be sure to update the configuration with your own service token.

Background

While not required reading, you may want to familiarize yourself with the following Knock concepts before beginning your migration so that you can understand more about the prompts you'll be providing to your LLM and the resources that you'll be creating:

Workflows
Channel steps
Email layouts
Partials
Referencing variables and your Knock data in templates
Knock liquid helpers

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Important considerations for best results.

We recommend leveraging an LLM with the largest context window available. In Cursor, you'll likely have the best results if you enable "MAX mode" on your agent. Note that this may have billing implications depending on your Cursor plan.
If you have a large number of templates, you will need to repeat the first step below multiple times with a subset of your templates to avoid exceeding the context window limit. We recommend providing no more than 5-10 template files per prompt. The prompt is designed so that you can run it multiple times and it will add to the existing template analysis if it has already been run.
Cursor will sometimes show a "⚠️" icon on the files that you add to chat context, with a tooltip that says "This file has been significantly condensed to fit in the context limit." If you see this, you should reduce the number of files you are providing as context to your prompt, as proceeding will result in migrated templates that are not pixel-perfect to your original templates.
As you work through the migration, start a new chat session to clear your context window if you notice that you are approaching the context window limit for the current session.
As always, remember that working with LLMs is non-deterministic. In our testing, we've found that the following prompts can get you very close to a pixel-perfect migration for most use cases, but the final step to test your workflows is crucial to ensure that your migrated templates look the way you want them to. Small adjustments are easy to do via prompt with the MCP server.

Migration steps

Now that you have everything you need for your migration, you're ready to get started!

Each step below contains a prompt that you can provide to your LLM. These prompts are designed to be run one at a time in order to provide the LLM with discrete tasks, thus improving the accuracy of the output.

Analyze your existing email templates

Before creating any resources in Knock, you'll need to analyze your existing email templates to extract layouts and shared components. Copy the prompt below and provide it to your LLM along with access to your template files. We recommend limiting your prompt to 5-10 template files at a time to avoid exceeding the context window limit.

Repeat this prompt as many times as necessary until you've analyzed all of your templates.

Prompt:

Create partials

Based on your analysis, you'll now create the identified partials. Copy the prompt below and provide it to your LLM along with access to the partials.md file generated in the previous step.

Prompt:

Create email layouts

Now you'll create the email layouts identified in your analysis. We'll do this in two parts; first we'll identify any duplicated layouts and determine which of the layouts should be used as your account's "default" layout, then we'll create all of the layouts in Knock. Provide the prompts below to your LLM one at a time, along with access to the layouts.md file generated in step 1.

Prompt:

Create workflows

For each email template, you'll create a workflow with an email step whose template leverages the layouts and partials noted in our analysis.

Prompt:

Summarize the successful migration

After creating all resources, you need to verify that the migration was successful. We'll ask our LLM to provide a summary report of the migration to ensure that nothing was missed.

Provide the prompt below to your LLM along with access to the templates.md file.

Prompt:

Test the migrated templates

Once you've summarized the migration and verified that you've created all of the resources identified, you can use the Knock MCP server to test the migrated templates. Make sure that you update the prompt to target the correct test user's ID.

You can use the MCP server to create a user that you'd like to send the test emails to, if you don't already have one in your development environment. You should update the example prompt to use a real email address and ID for the user so that you can view the test emails in your inbox.

Prompt: