Webinar 2: Customize and personalize your templates

Introduction

Hello! I am happy to welcome you at the second Shared Email Templates webinar. We will talk about template customization and personalization. I believe, this will take no more than 10 minutes.

As usual, you are very welcome to post your questions or concerns in the comments section.

We recommend that you watch the webinars in chronological order, as they are designed to present the product from simple to complex. Please find the link to the first webinar below.

Today, we will learn what template macros are, how to use them, and how to customize templates with the help of the properties feature.

A few words about myself so you know who is talking behind the microphone. My name is Irina Goroshko and I am marketing manager at Ablebits.

So, let’s go.

How to use template macros

What are template macros? Macros can be defined as commands that you give to a template.

Think of it this way. You can make a template automatically fill the To, Cc, Bcc, Subject fields of your email. Attach files to your messages. Insert images. Remind you to attach a document. Prompt you to enter some text. Check if message is sent from the correct account. Etcetera.

The full list and in-detail descriptions of all macros are available in our documentation that I will link down below.

In your template text, macros will always start from the tilde and percent signs and often will have some text in square brackets.

Now, I will show you how you can use some of the macros.

In Shared Email Templates, stand on the folder you want and click the New button. Let’s suppose, we need to attach a file from our local drive while replying to a certain kind of message.

We can create a shortcut ##attach. Do you remember how to create shortcuts? I explained it in the previous webinar.

So, I enter the text:

Please find attached the price list.

And to make sure I do not forget to attach a file and do not have to send another email with the forgotten attachment, I use the macro, that will remind me to add an attachment. For this, I open the Insert macro drop-down and pick the ~%WHAT_TO_ATTACH macro.

I save the template.

Now, let’s enter ##attach and click the Handle Shortcuts button. Look, it’s working! The application asks me to choose a file to attach and I do not have any chance to forget about it!

Or another example. Here I have a shortcut, this is a confidentiality disclaimer.

My message may be intended for different recipients, so I don’t want to change the email addresses in this text each time manually. Instead, I use the ~%TO,~%CC,~%BCC macros that automatically take data from these fields and put it into my message.

Look. I’ve got two addresses here and I paste this template to the message body.

Here are my recipients in the text! So, I do not spend time on checking or entering their names and can send the message right away.

This was a very quick introduction to macros. We will touch on this topic again and again during our next webinars.

Create and use profile properties

The second feature I’d like to present to you today is Properties.

From a bird's eye view, properties are small pieces of information that you can get quickly inserted into your templates.

I’ve got a story about the moment when we decided to develop this feature. I was making up some email templates for various cases, and one of them included an enumeration of different social networks accounts. I entered them all manually. When I showed these templates to our CEO, he called one of our developers and asked to create such a feature, when you can define some value once, and then quickly paste it into your template.

Let’s have a look how you can create properties.

In Shared Email Template pane, click the Three dots, select Profile, My account and click the Edit Account button.

Here, you can see the First name, Last name, Email, you can enter your date of birth... If you want to edit something, just do it right in the corresponding field and don’t forget to click Save Changes afterwards!

Next, let’s click Edit Properties right here. You can see the predefined properties; we were just editing them in the My Account section.

Also, there are custom properties that you create.

You can add any properties, for example, it may be your home address, or mobile number, or additional email, or company name, or social networks, pets name, the favorite car brand, or anything else!

Both predefined and custom properties are available in all your templates and shortcuts.

So, let’s create a couple of properties. We click Add Property and enter the value. The first will be The Best Company Ever and its name is going to be CompanyName. Click Save. Here is our property in the list.

Let’s add the Company Address. As we have the Best Company Ever here, let’s imagine it is located on the Bora Bora island, and this is its address.

We click Save again.

Now, let’s use the properties in our template! I click the NEW button and name my template here – Office Location.

And enter the text:

Please find our office here, colon.

To add a property, I will use a macro. So, click on the Insert macro button, and look for the PROFILE PROPERTIES. Here it is! I click on it and select the CompanyName in the drop-down list. OK.

I repeat this for the second property – Company address. OK. I save the template and insert it. Voila, here is the result.

Now, we can get back to our properties (Profile – Edit Properties - select the property of interest and click Edit right here) and change the company name to The Best Company Forever and Ever. Save.

Let’s use our template again. Look, the company name has changed as we edited the property.

You can create a number of properties, use them in your templates and shortcuts and, if anything changes, edit them only in your profile, no need to go to all the templates or shortcuts and waste time.

And, the cherry on the cake is that you can use HTML in your property values!

For instance, I want to add our Facebook account and of course it should be clickable!

So, it will be like this. Name – Facebook. And here, I use the Href attribute and insert our Facebook account address. Save. Close.

I create a new template and paste the new property.

I click Insert and get the clickable name with the link to our Facebook.

Wrap-up

That’s it for this webinar. We learned who basic features for template customization and personalization – template macros and profile properties.

On the next webinar, we will create our first team, add colleagues and share templates with them! And then – attach files and insert images, connect Outlook folders to Shared Email Templates, and more!

Great, we’ve done a good job! Please like this video if it was useful for you and subscribe to our channel to get the freshest updates!

Thank you all once again and see you very soon on the next webinar!