Taking advantage of time-saving email templates

Keeping in touch with your clients is important, but it doesn’t have to take ages! Light Blue’s email and text message templates save you time and mean that you don’t forget to say the important things. There’s no need to type the same messages out again and again, and our powerful mail-merge tags automatically personalise your messages with the relevant details.

Email templates are useful because they can save you a lot of time sending out standard responses to your clients’ queries, help you to use consistent wording, and present yourself with a professional image. You can use email templates whenever you create an email to a client from Light Blue, and you can also use them in workflows to send automated messages to your clients: for example, to remind them about a booking. You can find out more about automating emails in a separate article.

This guide will help you to:

• Send an email from a template
• Create a new email template
• Format your emails to include styling, images & links
• Add attachments to your emails
• Include mail-merge tags to personalise your email and message templates
• Use example email templates that will give you a head start

We’ll also look at:

• Sending text messages from a template
• Creating new text message templates

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Sending an email from a template

To send an email using a template from a shoot record, right click on the contact details in the Linked Records tab and choose to create email from template, then choose the template that you wish to use.

If you’d like to send an email from within the contact record, click on the cog icon to the right of the contact’s email address.

Creating a new email template

You set up your email templates in the Preferences window. You can add a new template by clicking the ‘Add Record’ button, then give the template a name and a subject line and then type the content of the message.

Formatting your emails

Our email templates include formatting options that allow you to control the look of your emails. The formatting bar at the top of the message body includes buttons for setting bold, italic, or underlined text, as well as fonts and text sizes. Do be careful about using fonts though, because if you choose a font that the recipient doesn’t have then your email might not appear quite like you’d expect.

Links

You can add links to your emails by selecting the text that you want to add a link to and clicking the link button, then typing in the URL that you want the link to go to, and clicking the Done button.

Images

Photography is obviously a visual product, and you can include images in your emails to show off your work or add more branded elements. To do that, select where you want the image to go and click the Image button.

From there you can choose an image that will get uploaded to our servers and be included in your email. Make sure that the image is scaled to a sensible size.

Adding attachments

The Add Attachment button at the bottom of the email window will allow you to choose any attachments that you wish to include with your email template.

Including mail-merge tags to personalise your messages

When you’re creating an email template, you can make use of Light Blue’s mail-merge tags to personalise the message and include relevant information about your clients and their shoots.

You’ll find a comprehensive list of Light Blue’s mail-merge tags in the knowledgebase on our website, and you can access this from your email template by clicking the handy link that appears on this page:

Light Blue’s mail-merge tags consist of special text that appears between a pair of % symbols. For example, to insert your client’s first name, you’d type a % symbol, then the tag, ContactFirstName and then the closing % symbol.

It’s important that you type them exactly as they appear in our knowledgebase. When you use the email template to create a message, the tag will be replaced with your client’s first name.

Sending text messages from a template

Like sending emails, it’s also possible to send text messages using templates. They’re a really helpful way of sending quick reminders to your clients in plain text.

To send a text message from shoot record, right click on the contacts in the linked records tab, and choose to send a text message from template.

If you’re viewing the contact record, you can click on the cog icon to the right phone number in the contact record.

Creating new text message templates

You can create a new text message templates in the text message templates preferences pane. To create a new template, click on the add record button in the top left-hand corner and then start writing your message. You can include mail-merge tags within text message template to automatically personalise the messages.