Salesforce.com email templates are an important tool to integrate in your sales and service processes. Your team will connect with prospects and customers with their phones or on email, both inbound and outbound. For phone conversations, these are logged as calls and appear in the Lead or Contact’s Activity History.
In the case of sending emails, these can be sent from your email client such as Outlook or Gmail. Adding the inbound and outbound emails from these programs uses the integration functionality of Salesforce.com or the Email-to-Salesforce.com feature. This records both inbound and outbound emails in the respective Salesforce records.
HTML email templates are predesigned and stored in your system. They help to increase productivity by providing a framework for sales and service engagement as well as ready-built content for your team.
In our Salesforce.com consulting work, we help to design the use cases for email templates. Here are 4 strategies to help you in your implementation and adoption:
- Design a process. There should be a sequence of steps for your sales team to follow. Lay out the process and identify the key steps. Within these steps, identify where communication with customers or partners need to happen and create the relevant content within your email templates. Ensure your folder structures and sequencing are set up for easy access by your users.
- Personalize the content. Seek to provide a professional and personal tone in each email template. This is part of your overall branding as you service your prospect or customer. Use merge fields with the right formality or casualness that the communication warrants.
- Provide concrete next steps. Each of your communication pieces have a specific purpose. For those that require action, spell out what is expected. Use numbers or bullets to let the recipient know what you are seeking such as “Fill out this form” or “Purchase your product” and use hyperlinks for specific landing pages.
- Monitor and follow up. Set up dashboards which help your team assess in real-time when email templates have been opened. This will allow your sales team to send follow-up emails or make a phone call. Open emails can even act as a call list for a specific day. Your recipient will have your brand as top of mind. This allows for a relevant conversation.
These are a few strategies for the powerful feature set you have with Salesforce.com email templates. If you design your templates to support your processes, then they will be a valuable part of an ongoing sales and support funnel and it will allow for control and value in the way you engage customers.
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