Prompt Templates for Your Business
11 min read
By now you have written some genuinely good prompts. Here is the last step that turns this skill into a business asset: stop writing them from scratch. A prompt template is a proven prompt with blanks — write it once, reuse it forever, and share it with your team so everyone gets your best results, not just you.
From prompt to template
Take any prompt that worked well and replace the parts that change each time with clearly marked placeholders. Curly brackets work well because they are easy to spot:
Role: You are an experienced customer service writer for a small
{BUSINESS TYPE}.
Context: A customer wrote the following message. Our policy
notes that may be relevant: {PASTE RELEVANT POLICY OR "none"}.
Customer message: {PASTE CUSTOMER MESSAGE}
Task: Draft a reply that resolves the issue or clearly explains
the next step.
Format: Under 120 words. Tone: {TONE - e.g. warm and apologetic /
friendly and firm}. Never promise refunds or exact dates unless
they appear in the policy notes above. Sign off as {YOUR NAME}.Next customer complaint, you fill four blanks and get an on-policy draft in thirty seconds — and so does the newest member of your team, on their first day. Notice the template also bakes in the guardrail you would otherwise have to remember every time ("never promise refunds..."). That is iteration from Chapter 2 paying its dividend: every lesson you learned the hard way becomes a permanent line in the template.
Anatomy of a good template
- Built on RCTF. All four parts present, with Context holding most of the placeholders.
- Placeholders are obvious and few. Aim for 3 to 6 blanks; if a template needs ten, split it into two templates.
- Instructions that never change are written in full. Tone rules, banned phrases, legal cautions, sign-offs.
- A filled example lives next to it. One completed sample shows new staff exactly how to use it — few-shot prompting applied to your own team.
Build your starter library
You do not need fifty templates. Most small businesses get enormous mileage from five:
- Customer reply (the template above).
- Marketing announcement — new product, sale, or event, adapted from your best past email.
- Social media post in your voice, with 2 real examples embedded few-shot style.
- Meeting or call summary — paste raw notes, get decisions, action items, and open questions.
- Job posting or internal how-to doc, so hiring and training stop starting from blank pages.
Store them anywhere your team already looks: a shared doc, a note in your point-of-sale wiki, a pinned message. The tool does not matter; findability does. Name each one by the job it does ("Reply to unhappy customer"), and put your name and a date on it.
Keep templates alive
A template is a living document. When a draft needs the same manual fix twice, that fix belongs in the template. When your policies, prices, or brand voice change, update the Context block the same week. A quick quarterly read-through of your library takes ten minutes and keeps every future draft on-brand. Stale templates quietly reintroduce the generic output you took this course to escape.
Templates are also where everything in this course converges: RCTF gives them structure, few-shot examples give them your voice, iteration hardens them, and chains connect them — the output of your "meeting summary" template becomes the input to your "client follow-up email" template.
Try it now
Take the best prompt you have written during this course and turn it into a template: replace the changeable parts with {PLACEHOLDERS}, write the permanent rules in full, and paste one filled-in example below it. Save it somewhere your team can find, then use it for real within 48 hours. One working template in daily use is worth more than this whole course in theory.