Creating Email Templates Part 2- Creating Email Templates Creating email templates can be done from either the system administrator's account-- and if you do it from there, it will be able to be used by the whole organization. Or you can just do it for your own individual account if you're a user. Keep in mind you do need to have the correct permissions to send out emails. And if you need them and you don't have them, you might want to talk to your system administrator about getting those added to your profile. So let's go ahead and go through the process of setting up the template. So we go to Setup, and you'll notice that at the bottom here there is an Admin Setup section with email communication template settings here. And we can manage our letterheads and email templates there. But everyone has the Email setting at the top, so I'm going to use that for example's sake. So what we want to do is we want to save my template. So if we click on the My Templates, and we see we have some templates there. So we want to create a new one, and we click on New Template. And we have some options here. So we have two options here, basically. I mean, we have four options, but two that are most commonly used. Text, where we could just insert text and send out text emails. That might be useful for some people if they have recurring text they want to fill in. HTML using a letterhead that we've defined. We've defined a letterhead in an earlier video. And custom, which you can sort of paste in your own HTML. This is best if you already have a designer who's done this for you. You could also use Visualforce. And if you have some Visualforce experience, you probably don't need to listen to me doing this video. So you'll know how to do this. So let's go ahead and go through using the letterhead version because I think most people would probably be using this. And if we click on Next, we get into the usual force.com based wizard. Now the folder-- this is the file public reports folder. And if we keep it in here, it's public, so everybody can use these email templates. So depending on what you want to do, if you want to leave them in your personal folder or the public email templates folder, that's up to you. Click the available to use-- don't forget that. A lot of people forget that and they can't figure out why it's not working. That's just there in case you want to work on a template and make some changes to it, and it's not really ready for production yet. So let's just call this template's name saying "Special Offer Today." And once we Tab to the other field, we'll see that it's populated the name already. And here's where we pick the letterhead. I'm going to choose this one that we set up earlier. And we can see there's some layout stuff here if you want to use them. And here there's more options. If you want to use that, you can click through that and check that out. Of course, just like any other page when you're doing this, there's the contextual help menu that you can click on and get a lot of detailed information. And if you want to write a description there, you can write additional information. Click on Next. I clicked Free Form Letter in this case-- it gives us more freedom. Click on Next, and then you can see that our template is in there-- our letterhead is in there. And now we start with our template. So we can write "Special Offer" for the subject-- "Special Offer From Propertybase," for instance. And here's where we start to go. So "Dear," and here's what we want to do. So we want to do-- we want to enter, for instance, a field-- a Contact Field. And we want to look for salutation. So there we see it-- Contact Salutation. That's the merge field value. Pick that up with Copy, Paste, and paste it right there. So there's "Dear salutation" and last name-- so we're still on contact fields. Contact field is up here, and it's called Last Name. So we see Contact Last Name. And we want to pick up the comma and put it in the right place, and then we can say today we have a special offer. So what is the system going to do with this, and obviously you can-- I mean, throughout the body of your email, you can insert more merge fields. It just means you're taking the fields up from your Propertybase data and sticking them in this email. So that's exactly what it means. You can see that you can select a lot of different objects here. For instance, if you have a specific listing that you want to stick in there, you can easily do that. So that's basically the overview of how it works. Again, there's a help-- a contextual help. You can use formatting with fonts and colors and justification and all this stuff. We'll finish that off so it's a little bit good. Click on Next after we've stuck all of our data in there and we're satisfied with the content we have. We click on Next, and what does this do-- the text-only email content? A lot of people maybe don't have email capability to read an HTML-formatted email. Not so much these days, but occasionally people do have that turned off. So you want to make sure they can still get the content. So we can just stick the text in there. And unless you want to specify a custom text, that still works. So there we go. We pasted the text in there. We click on Save. There's a preview of how it's going to look, and the text preview. We can add an attachment if we want, and that's our template. We can edit them easily here. Delete them, clone them if we want to build on something going forward. So that's how we create a template, and the next thing is to match it up with a list of people we want to send it out to and we're on the way.
What are email templates?
Email templates are used to send a standard message to your contacts. You can enrich these templates with data from Propertybase.
Why are templates important?
Templates are important to use the email functions inside Propertybase. Once you learn to customize the email templates you can create new communications quickly and share them across your team.
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