Webinar 1: Use templates and shortcuts

Introduction

Hello! Thank you for taking the time to watch the first Shared Email Templates webinar. Today, we’ll take approximately 10-15 minutes to discuss some of the basic features of the product.

If you’ve got any questions right now or will have after the webinar, please post them in the comments section!

If you still have not installed Shared Email Templates, please find the link to the setup instructions below this video. Also, I’ll add the link to the Introduction documentation page that will help you get started with the product interface.

During the webinar, we’ll learn how to create and use simple email templates and email building blocks, template shortcuts.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Irina Goroshko, I am marketing manager at Ablebits. I’ve been enjoying working in digital marketing since 2016.

In Ablebits, for more than 20 years, we’ve been developing software products to help you accomplish your day-to-day tasks quickly and efficiently in Microsoft Excel, Word and Outlook. The Shared Email Templates product is our new creation. As for now, there are more than 150 000 of our customers all over the world, and this is what they say.

So, why may you need email templates? What use of them can you make? Answers to these questions may vary depending on the tasks you solve. But in general, the main goals of the product are to save your time, reduce the amount of routine correspondence, prevent you from making mistakes and typos, and ensure you never forget to mention all the important issues in your message.

Create and use templates

Ok, now, let’s figure out how to use templates when replying to emails. It's easy like one-two-three.

Pick a message you want to answer and click Reply. In the ribbon, click the Shared Email Templates icon, choose a template and click the Insert button. The reply is ready! Imagine, how many emails you can answer so quickly with help of templates!

Now, let’s create a new message using a template. Create New Email, run Shared Email Templates, pick a template and click the Insert button. Pretty easy, isn’t it?

Want your own template? Let’s create your first template right now. In the message body, type the template text, for example:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us, your message is received.

Best regards,

Irina Goroshko

Marketing Manager

Select this text, start Shared Email Templates and click New Template. Do you see? The selected text has appeared in the new template. In this field, you can give your template a name to easily find it in the future. Save the template to finish.

Insert your new template as you did before. You can create more templates for future use.

So, now we know how to use and create simple email templates. Shared Email Templates offers you not only templates, but another feature, template shortcuts. For simplicity's sake, further I will refer to them as “shortcuts”.

Create and use template shortcuts

Probably, you often use the same common short phrases in your correspondence: salutations, formal greetings, signatures, etc. To save you from wasting time on retyping the same text, we created template shortcuts. Shortcuts are small units that you can use as building blocks in your messages or templates. What you need to do is to simply enter the names of shortcuts into your replies or templates.

Shortcuts let you customize templates in one place and easily change something in the future. For example, I’ve got a shortcut with my signature and position that is used in many of my templates. If my job position or title changes, I change it only in this shortcut and I don’t have to go to all the templates and edit them. Shortcuts are very easy to use too.

There are two ways to insert a shortcut into a message. In the tree, shortcuts look like templates, but with the blue hash symbol. Select a shortcut: #Hello

Click the Insert button and here is the message.

This was the first way how to use template shortcuts. As you have noticed, the "##hello" phrase is not present in the letter – this is the shortcut name and it is not inserted into the message. You need this name to use the shortcut in your template or directly in the Outlook message body.

Do the following: In the Outlook email, type ##hello and click the Handle Shortcuts button right here. You’ll get the text of a shortcut right in your message. This was the second way of using shortcuts.

Creating a shortcut is as easy as creating a template. We click New Template, enter some text, name our template and, also, name the shortcut right in this field by simply clicking the hashes. For the shortcut name, you can use the words that come to mind first – it’s more likely that you will remember them to apply the shortcut in the future. By the way, to rename a shortcut, simply click on its name in the preview and enter the necessary edits.

So, we’ve done it.

Let’s insert the shortcuts into a message to see how they look like. If needed, we can change their font or size. It’s better to determine the preferred font for shortcuts - then after inserting them all into emails, your messages will look good.

We’ll do it right in a new message in Outlook. Let’s enter hash hash and names of shortcuts. Click the Handle Shortcuts button!

As a result, we get a ready email, in which you can see the text of several shortcuts collected together in the order we need. Handy, right?

Now, it’s time to use our shortcuts in a template. Let’s open an already created template and change the “Best regards, Irina” phrase to our shortcut ##sign_small
We save the changed template and insert it into the message. As you can see, we get the same result.

As I said before, if anything changes in my signature, the only place where I edit it is the shortcut – no need to make any changes in all my templates where I use this shortcut.
So, I edit the signature, paste the template again, and look – the text has changed, although I didn’t edit the template.

As you have probably noticed, you can create templates in Outlook and bring them to Shared Email Templates with ease. Besides, surely, you can create templates directly in the Shared Email Templates editor. You are free to create many different shortcuts, combine them and thus create a variety of different templates or replies.

Wrap-up and contacts

That’s it for today. We covered the basic features of Shared Email Templates: learned how to create and use simple email templates, how to create shortcuts and use them in templates and emails. There is so much more to come, and I am looking forward to presenting you all the possibilities of our product: how to share templates in teams, attach files and insert images, personalize your replies, and more!