Leads are the essence of any business, be it big or small. The prosperity of your business revolves around the extent of contextual interaction you have with your leads. There is a bevy of marketing tools that facilitate efficient communication with your leads in the market today – phone, instant messenger, social media platforms, and many more. But, did you know that email marketing reigns supreme over all others? If you think about it, almost every business and person has an email account. Active email accounts are expected to hit 5.6 billion this year (as of 2019). A well-scripted email can ensure better interactions with the lead, and eventually better conversions to deals. 174% more conversions have been generated by email marketing than social media. Which is why email remains as a quintessential weapon for salespersons to engage with their customers.
While email is an advantageous communication tool in sales, it gets tedious and time-consuming to constantly draft, edit, and schedule emails. In fact, salespeople spend only about a third of their day actually selling. The rest is spent on writing emails and entering data. This means you focus less on what actually matters—selling.
This is where email templates come in handy. As a salesperson, you depend on your CRM to draft and send various welcome, follow-up and thank you emails frequently. While this is efficient, you still spend a lot of time tied to your desk. But a CRM like Freshsales allows you to create and manage email templates, and reduce the time you spend on mundane email tasks.
Why you should use email templates
1. Reduce errors
Say you need to send a welcome email to every person who signs up for your product. Typing and retyping such emails to multiple customers can lead to typographical and spelling errors. You can miss out crucial details and lose credibility. With email templates, you can reduce the liability of errors in your emails considerably.
2. Manage time better
Do you recreate each email from scratch? This takes up a lot of time from your day and is outright inefficient. Instead, you can use email templates to slash out the time you spend at your desk.
3. Engage better with personalized emails
Addressing your leads personally helps you engage with them better. Personalized emails go a long way for a business. With placeholders in email templates, you can establish a connection with your leads exclusively.
How to create email templates?
Now that you know how email templates help your business, how do you create them?
You can access templates from Conversations > Email > Email Templates. Alternatively, you can click on your profile photo and choose Email templates from the drop-down list or choose email templates from Admin Settings.
Choose Add template, and enter the name of the template, subject, and content. You can use placeholders to give your emails a personal touch. You can also attach files, images or links. Hit save. This template gets added to your email templates list.
Three features that enhance your email templates
1. Placeholders
Generic emails get lost in the high number of marketing emails that flow in from various sources. Make your emails stand out by personalizing them. Personalizing your emails add uniqueness, grab the attention of the reader and are more likely to be clicked or opened. Personalized email marketing is said to generate a median ROI of 122%.
Choose your desired placeholders from the drop-down list in the email content window. They will be replaced by the lead’s or contact’s details from the CRM for each recipient. Unmapped custom fields are signaled as errors, highlighted in red, in the email text window. The ‘send’ button is also disabled. Your emails are reviewed and sent only if the placeholder has appropriate values.
As your lead advances down the pipeline to a contact, you don’t have to alter your email templates. With the placeholder mapping feature, default lead fields get automatically mapped to the corresponding contact fields.
Refer to our article on how to use Email Placeholders.
2. Tags and filters
If you have a long email templates list, looking up one particular template is arduous. With Freshsale you can tag your emails templates for easy access.
Add or create tags for your email templates as you create them. You can have as many tags as you need for each template. Just look up the tags instead of scrolling through your templates list.
Find relevant email templates from your list using filters. You can access based on the filters – Created by me, Created by others, Most recent, All Templates and Tags.
Learn more on how to organize and filter templates.
3. Sharing
Boost collaboration and productivity with your team by sharing email templates. You can share the templates you create with others in your team and, likewise, use the templates that others have shared with you. You can choose to share with yourself, everyone in your team, or select users based on names, territories or teams.
Visit our article to know more about template sharing.
Where can I use email templates?
1. Send an email to a lead/contact
You can use email templates when you send emails to a particular lead/contact. Say you need to send a follow-up email. You can select your desired ‘follow-up’ template from the templates drop-down in your compose window.
The details of your lead/contact get auto-filled in the placeholders. You can edit the template as required, but these changes won’t be saved to the template.
2. Send bulk emails
If your team has email-heavy sales processes, your mailing list is quite long. Let’s say you need to follow-up with a number of people about your product. You don’t have the time to type out personalized emails to each one of them.
To optimize your email experience, you can use bulk email as your go-to alternative. Select the leads/contacts and choose Bulk email action from the bulk actions tray. You can compose the email or better yet, choose the required template from the drop-down list.
3. Generate workflows
Being a salesperson, you have your hands full with sending emails, making calls, engaging, qualifying leads, and so much more. Wouldn’t it be easier if some of your mundane tasks could be automated?
Say you need to send a welcome email every time someone signs up for a trial account. You can create a workflow, based on the actions performed by your leads/contacts (in this case, signing up for a trial account) and trigger a follow-up – sending an email, that you choose from your list of email templates.
4. Campaigns
Email marketing helps you keep in touch with your clients. With Freshsales automated email campaigns, you can set up, personalize emails, track the effectiveness of the campaign, and follow up with leads based on their behavior.
You can choose between classic and smart campaigns, select who enters your campaign, and choose the email template you need from the drop-down list. You can also view the overall performance of the template, allowing you to hand-pick the best performing templates for your email campaigns.
You’ve now mastered the use of email templates, but what next? Here’s a list of tips to enhance your email management.
1. Track your emails – email metrics
After you’ve sent your emails individually or by campaigns and workflows, how do you know if your emails have been read or opened? You need a metric to find how effective your emails have been.
Use the built-in email tracker to check if emails were opened, clicked, when they were read, and how often. You can view the performance of each individual template in the Templates section under Conversations. You can also get real-time notifications when the recipients access your emails.
2. Email signature
You’ve drafted your perfect email with great content and catchy subject. The next value addition to your email comes from an email signature. Having an email signature with all necessary components increases the credibility of your email and ensures better opens and click-throughs.
Click your profile photo > Settings > Email Settings. Under Email signature, type in your text. You can also upload images as well. The customized email signature gets automatically added to the body of your email.
Enhance your email management with Freshsales
Time management is one of the most challenging tasks for salespeople to master. With email templates, you can establish contextual interaction with your leads and focus your time on high priority sales tasks. By delegating the function of managing email templates and sending contextual emails to Freshsales, you can now erase manual work from your schedule and improve your productivity.
Cover illustration by Ashna Liza Sunny
