Salesforce.com For Dummies®

Chapter . Improving Communication with Standard Templates

In This Chapter

• Defining templates

• Setting up e‐mail template folders

• Creating e‐mail templates

• Setting up mail merge templates

• Running a mail merge

The wonderful thing about creating communication templates (as the name implies) is that it allows you and your end users to reuse what works instead of repeatedly reinventing the wheel. In so doing, your company can use templates to communicate to so many more people than you otherwise could, and your users can sell and service more productively.

With Salesforce, you can build reusable templates both for documents and e‐mail messages. And templates in Salesforce can make use of mail merge with Microsoft Word. (More on merge fields in the next section.) But the point is that your end users can quickly generate documents or e‐mails that are both professional and highly personalized.

In this chapter, we show you how to create standard e‐mail templates, and generate customized Microsoft Word documents.

Understanding Standard Templates

In the normal course of using Salesforce, you will collect pertinent information (like names, titles, addresses, and so on) on accounts, contacts, leads, and other records. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to retype that information in every time you send an e‐mail or create a quote or proposal in Microsoft Word? A template allows you to do this by combining reusable content with merge fields for your customized content.

In Salesforce, you can use two ...