Creating a Sales template in Act! Marketing Automation

Question: How do I create a Sales template in Act! Marketing Automation?

Product Details:

• Product Family: Emarketing
• Product: Act! Marketing Automation

Answer:

Incorporating sales into your marketing strategy can often be a pain for Marketers, especially within a marketing automation platform. But what if we made it super easy and with a flow that matches your marketing campaigns you're already used to? Well, you're in luck! With a simple but powerful option to create marketing AND sales templates and import these into email campaigns, you as the Marketer can still control the flow of the drip while helping your sales team better reach out, track and follow up with their leads.

A sales template is a simplified template that will appear to be a simple text email to recipients using our WYSIWYG editor rather than the Drag and Drop editor. Recipients will think this email is personalized for them and directly from the sales rep. To create a sales template:

1. Click the Templates menu item from within Act! Marketing Automation.
2. Click the Actions drop down and select New Template.
3. From within the All Templates tab, select One Column: WYSIWYG then click Continue.
4. On the next page, give your template a name. The name is only internally facing, so give it a name you and other users can easily recognize.
5. If you would like this template to be available in Act! CRM as a template that can be used by CRM users (like your Sales team), check the Allow Sales Access checkbox.
6. Once finished setting up the template parameters, click Save.
7. Now that you are in the template editor, type in the message that you would like to send on behalf of your sales reps. You will notice that all text is left aligned to the editor, similar to the format when typing out an email from your inbox!
8. Important note on Merge Tags: You may notice while in the template editor, whether using the WYSIWYG or Drag and Drop editor, that you only see three fields that are available for use. These three fields are Your Company Name, Your Company Address and Copyright Year. These merge tags will populate with your company information and pulls data from your company name and address that is entered into your Account Configuration screen from within the Admin tool. The reason you do not see contact merge tags, like Contact.FirstName, is because a template is not a part of a campaign yet and so does not have a group yet associated to it. The contact merge tags you are able to use are determined by the Act! group that you are sending to. So, once this template is imported into a campaign, you will then be able to edit the template (now an email) to add your contact merge tags. In the example above, I added placeholders that I will later replace with contact and user merge tags once this template is imported into my campaign.
9. Once you have finished editing your template's message, click the Actions drop down and select Save to save and remain on this screen, or Save and Return to save and return to your template library.
10. A pop up will ask you to confirm the name of your template. If you would like to make any changes to the name, you can do so here. To return to the template library, click Save.