Are you still creating new emails from scratch every time you send one through Salesforce? If you are, it’s time to learn how to create an email template. Find out why templates are so powerful and how to create your own email template in Salesforce.
Understanding why templates are essential for Salesforce email success
One of the main reasons for using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform like Salesforce is to build customer relationships.
Email is a natural fit for this goal, writes Ryan Pinkham, the former senior vice president of revenue at Privy, a Shopify sales app. “Email marketing can help to build customer relationships by providing them with information they want — directly into their inbox on a consistent basis,” he explains. “When you help make your audience’s lives better, whether that be with your product or service, helpful tips, or even just a ‘happy birthday’ gift coupon, they will learn to appreciate and trust you.”
But you don’t have to produce a new email every time you want to nurture customer relationships. Smart marketers use templates — and for good reason. There are several benefits to using email templates, says Graham Anderson, system architect at OpenCRM. The email is quicker to create, there’s less room for error, and you never have to worry about the design or formatting once you’ve initially produced it.
The customer also benefits from your use of templates. By using templates to create campaigns, you become much more responsive, writes Kevin George, head of marketing at Email Uplers. This is especially true with transactional emails which the recipient initiates. These are often time critical, so faster responses will have a positive impact on the customer experience.
Creating Salesforce Classic email templates
You can use Salesforce Classic templates to create automated emails that get sent through Workflow or Process Builder when certain events are triggered. Creating a Classic email template is easy:
- Start by heading to your Setup and then search for Classic Email Templates. You’ll be taken to the templates page, where you’ll click on the New Template button.
- Choose the type of template you want to create (Text, HTML, Custom, Visualforce).
- Name the template and choose a folder for it. Make sure you check the Available for use box if you want your colleagues to be able to access it as well.
- Write your template. You can use the accompanying drop-down menus to personalize your template based on the data you have stored in Salesforce.
- Click Next to create a plain text version of your email.
- Send yourself a test to make sure everything looks good.
Creating Salesforce Lightning email templates
You can also use Salesforce Lightning templates to create the emails you use to communicate with individual customers. It’s equally easy to create a Lightning email template:
- Navigate to a contact and click on the email button.
- Click the Insert, Create, or Update Template button and then choose to create a template.
- Now create your template. You can merge fields here to personalize your template automatically when you send an email to another contact.
- Save your template when finished.
- Test your template by sending it to yourself or a contact you know well. If you’re happy with how it looks, then you’re good to go.
Integrating Jotform with Salesforce for better emails
Jotform offers a Salesforce integration that allows customers to collect and store customer CRM data through Jotform’s forms. We already have a guide to integrating Jotform with Salesforce, but what email users will be really interested in is the prefill feature that lets you populate forms with data from your Salesforce CRM.
If you’re sending a form to your customers via email, you can make it much easier for them to fill out, significantly increasing their completion rate. What’s more, any data your customers modify will automatically update in your Salesforce CRM. There’s simply no better way to gather, store, and update leads than by using Jotform and a Salesforce email template.
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