The Quick Guide for Creating Email Templates in Salesforce Lightning

Email plays a vital role in acquiring new customers and managing relationships with existing ones. The problem is that you and your team likely send a ton of emails daily. With these high volumes comes a lot of time and effort, the possibility of errors, and the chance of inconsistencies in your messaging and branding.

Luckily, Salesforce’s Lightning Experience has a solution: email templates. But what are these email templates, and how do you create them like a power user?

In this post, we’ll answer these questions in more detail.
 

What Are Email Templates in Salesforce Lightning?

As with any other template, email templates in Salesforce Lightning allow you to use predefined email content and merge fields, which, in turn, helps you create and send emails quickly and easily. This is especially helpful when you send emails to many contacts or leads daily.
 

Why Should You Use Email Templates?

Now that we’ve seen what email templates are, let’s consider some of the benefits you’ll get when you use these templates.
 

Email Templates in Salesforce Save Time

We’ve already mentioned that templates help you send emails quickly and easily because they save you so much time. For example, when using templates in Salesforce, you can add a lot of information automatically by using merge fields, which, in turn, means your team doesn’t need to type this information out manually.

Moreover, your team won’t need to:

• Format emails
• Add custom HTML
• Insert images manually.

Ultimately, using email templates will increase your team’s efficiency and free up time so that you and your team can focus on bigger priorities like campaigns and increasing your lead conversion.
 

Reduce Errors

Being able to insert images, custom HTML, and add information automatically with merge fields does not only save you time and effort. It also eliminates many manual tasks, reducing the possibility of human errors.

This helps you not only improve your communication and make it more effective but also enhance the customer experience. And don’t forget that properly formatted emails without errors make your business appear much more professional.
 

 

Increased Personalization

By using merge fields, you automatically insert your customers’ or prospects’ names and details into your emails. And nowadays, this is extremely valuable as personalization significantly increases your open, click-through, and conversion rates.

If your email templates are customized and contain information specifically relevant to each individual prospect, they’ll consider them, so you get the chance to book a meeting and ask the right questions. Otherwise, your emails might land in the Trash folder.
 

Improved Response Rates

We’ve now seen that eliminating errors and properly formatting emails can make your emails appear more professional. We’ve also seen how you can make your emails more personalized. For your customers and prospects, this means a few things.

For one, they’ll get professional-looking communication that matches your brand. Flowing from this, they’ll know that the emails you send are from a trusted source. They’ll be far more likely to open and respond to your emails, so you can keep building relationships with your accounts or expanding new opportunities.
 

Maintain Consistency

Apart from the benefits mentioned above, email templates also give you another distinct advantage. Simply put, when you use properly formatted templates, your email communication will stay consistent across your entire business, no matter who sends an email.

This also plays a vital role in building relationships with your leads and accounts. Consistency ensures that your audience recognizes your brand and emails. In turn, it’s established that consumers trust those brands they recognize more than others.
 

Creating Email Templates

You’ll have a few options when you’re wondering how to create email templates in Salesforce Lightning, including the following:
 

Option A. Create Salesforce Email Templates Using the Email Template Builder

Here are the steps you’ll follow to create an email template using the Email Template Builder.

1. Click on the App Launcher on your Salesforce dashboard and search Templates in the App Menu. From the results that appear, click on Email Templates. On the page that opens, click on New Email Template, which will open the New Email Template window.
2. In the New Email Template window, you’ll complete the information about your template. So, you’ll give your template a name and write a subject line. You’ll also choose an object to which the template relates and where you’d like to save the template. Once done, click Save.
3. The page that opens will have an Edit in Builder button. Clicking the button will take you to the Email Template Builder.
4. In the Email Template Builder, you can add components to the template.
   • You can customize all these components using the sidebar’s properties panel. For instance, you can change the template’s background color, add images, and insert custom HTML.
5. Once done, click Save to save the template and then the Back icon to return to the Email Templates page. You can now use the template in an email by clicking the Template icon in the email composer and choosing the template.

When using Email Template Builder, there are some things you’ll need to consider:

• Merge fields. The merge field picker won’t work when you’re editing a rich text editor component in Source Mode.
  • You can, however, type merge fields manually to add them.
  • Also, there’s no merge field for the subject line, but you can also add these manually.
• Images. To insert a Salesforce File as an image into your template, you should use the Select From Files button. When you save the template, these images will be converted from Content Document links to Content Asset links.
  • Also, SVG files aren’t supported, and the image upload selector won’t work when you’re editing a rich editor component in Source Mode.
• Active content is any dynamic content that adds interactivity to a website or email.
  • You won’t be able to use any active content in an HTML or Rich Text component. This is simply because active content won’t appear correctly and, more importantly, can compromise your security.
• Personal information. Although you won’t be able to use active content to eliminate security risks, there are still some ways in which personally identifiable data can be exposed.
  • One of these is by entering this information into your email templates. It could also happen when you use free-form fields to include customer information.
  • For these reasons, you should avoid these mistakes and use merge fields in your templates when dealing with customer data.

Option B. How to Create Email Templates from the Salesforce Email Composer

Apart from using the Email Template Builder, you can also use the Email Composer to create an email template in Salesforce Lightning. Here are the steps you’ll follow to do this.

1. Open a record that offers email, for example, an opportunity or an account.
2. Click on the Activity tab and select the Email tab to open the email composer.
3. If you’d like, you can also select an entity in the Related To field. Remember, though, that the type of record you choose will determine what merge fields will be available.
4. You’ll then compose the email you’d like to use as your template. Here, you can also choose an existing email template and edit it.
5. Next, add a subject. If you’d like to include any merge fields in your subject field, you’ll need to add them manually.
6. Add any images you’d like to your template. To do this, you can either use the Insert Images icon or copy and paste the images.
7. Click the Merge icon if you want to add merge fields to your template with the merge picker.
   • You can also use the Source icon if you’d like to add any custom HTML code to your template.
8. You can also add any attachments to the template. When you save the template, any content document links you’ve used in the template will be converted to content asset links.
9. Finally, click on the Templates icon and save your template as a new template.

Streamline Your Emails Now

With properly formatted, error-free email templates, you’ll make your team more productive in Salesforce, enhance your customer experience, build valuable relationships with your customers, and maintain brand consistency across your entire business. And now that you know the ins & outs of creating Salesforce email templates, you’ll be ready to go!