Templates

Templates will make your life easier once you start using the system. Every time I do training or talk to customers, I always stress the importance of creating templates, whether it’s email templates, customer journey templates, or landing page templates. It’s a way to make sure that everyone is using the same layout and graphic design and just generally makes it easier to not have to start from scratch every time.

There are some important settings in this area we’re going to go through – that is, content settings, form fields, and email templates. We will also take a look at some templates specifically for outbound and real-time marketing.

Content settings

Content settings is where you register companies’ addresses, social media URLs, subscription center, and Forward to a friend details. We’ll go through the subscription center and Forward to a friend in depth in Chapter 4, Managing Marketing Forms, Pages, and Websites. These will then be used when you send out your marketing emails. If you have multiple companies using the same Marketing solution, you can use different content settings (Figure 1.26) for the different companies:

Figure 1.26 – Content settings

Form fields

To be able to store information in a form, you need to create a form field and connect this to the correct field on your contact or lead table (Figure 1.27). Several of the most used fields (such as name, email, and address) are already created by default, but if you want to add others, you need to create the relevant form fields before you can use them in your marketing forms:

Figure 1.27 – Form fields

Email templates

Your emails are one of the most important places to create templates. You want all your emails that are sent out to look somewhat the same, in line with your company’s established graphical profile, and templates are a good way of making sure of this. You can create template emails with different layouts ready for use by everyone who needs to create any type of email (Figure 1.28). This way, you can just focus on creating relevant content and not have to worry about the actual layout of the email each time:

Figure 1.28 – Email templates

Outbound specific

As of November 2022, most templates are created in the Outbound section of Dynamics 365 Marketing. Let’s go through which templates you can create from the outbound area.

Customer journey templates

Let’s say you want to create a simple customer journey based on how you run your events and how you communicate with the attendees from Dynamics 365 Marketing. If you use templates (Figure 1.29), you can have all of this set up for you so that you don’t have to start from scratch. If you start from nothing, it is easy to miss some important steps in your communication – you might miss a reminder the day before the event starts, or you might miss the evaluation afterward. If you create a customer journey template, then you can make sure that everyone follows and creates the same type of journey for all the same types of events:

Figure 1.29 – Outbound customer journey templates

Forms, pages, and websites

Other types of templates you can make are forms, pages, and websites (Figure 1.30). For example, if you do a Christmas campaign each year with the same form, the same page, and the same website, that’s a perfect reason to create a template:

Figure 1.30 – Marketing website template

I often use event-form templates (Figure 1.31) to make it easier for people to register for events. Other contact forms are also good to have templates for:

Figure 1.31 – Event form template

Segments

Segments are another type of template you can create, as shown in Figure 1.32. There are some segments that you will likely want to use several times, such as to find out who attended an event. If you create a template with the most used segments, it will make it easier to create that segment in the future:

Figure 1.32 – Segment templates

Maybe you have one core criterion you always want to have in all your segments. You can have that as your template and create all your new segments from that template, making sure the base criterion is always in place.

Activities

You can also create calls, tasks, and appointments as templates. This way, you can use them in a customer journey. If, for example, you have a customer journey that starts with a lead coming into your system, then you want to automatically register a call to the new potential customer to get more information on their needs, and this process will use a call template. Another use for this is if you want to make sure you run credit checks on all potential customers, and you have one person that does this whenever a new lead comes into the system. In this context, you can create a task for each lead that comes in for the credit checker to go through.

As you can see, there are several templates you should consider setting up in your system before you start using it. All of these templates can make it easier for you to work with the system in the future.