How do you organise email templates for multiple teams and brands?

Salesforce has multiple template systems and they overlap awkwardly:

• Lightning Email Templates (the modern default) — created and edited in the Email Templates app, stored as Enhanced Letterheads or HTML/Text. Folder-based organisation. Used by Email integration, Email Composer, and most flow/send-email actions.
• Classic Email Templates — legacy. Visualforce, Custom HTML, and Text variants. Some legacy automations still reference them.
• Email Alert Templates (used by Workflow/Flow email alerts) — bound to a specific template at design time.

Folder strategy is where most orgs go wrong. Recommended structure:

1. Folder per team/brand — Sales Templates, Service Templates, Marketing Templates, Brand-A, Brand-B.
2. Folder permissions — share each folder only with the public group or role for that team. Marketing's templates shouldn't accidentally end up in Sales' picker.
3. Subfolders for sequences — within a team, group by use case: Welcome, Follow-up, Renewal, Escalation.
4. Naming convention with prefix — [Sales] Welcome - New Customer is clearer than Welcome - New Customer once you have hundreds of templates across teams.
5. Letterhead per brand — multi-brand orgs benefit from one Enhanced Letterhead per brand so headers/footers stay consistent automatically.
6. Merge field discipline — encourage templates that pull from the recipient's record fields rather than hard-coded values, so one template handles all owners/regions.

Audit periodically: orphaned templates referencing deleted users, broken merge fields, templates not used in 12 months.