Removing the Hassle
Maintaining communications with your customers or prospects is key to any business. At the same time though, personalizing every email can be a time-consuming task. As an alternative, you can create mass emails but lose the personalized touch as a result, especially when it comes to handling sensitive or financial information unique to every individual. So how do you take both of these win-lose scenarios and meet in the middle, where you can get the personalized email content and the time-savings all in one? Mail Merge Templates, of course!
Whether you have monthly newsletters differentiated by interests or monthly financial statements to provide to your customers, there can be plenty of information unique to them, such as their names, account, address, and more. Mail Merge Templates can save you the hassle by allowing you to pull the data from your Dynamics 365 environment and embed it in the content as you wish. Let’s see how it works.
Creating a Mail Merge Template
To start, go to Settings >> Templates >> Mail Merge Templates and click New.
Under Categorization, specify which Associated Entity you want to pull your data from. In our case, we chose Opportunity.
Now you must save the template in order to continue. Once you have saved the template, you will be prompted to select your Data Fields.
Now you can select all of the fields you need in your email from the associated entity. You can also select fields from entities that have a relationship with your chosen associated entity.
Once you’ve chosen your fields, hit Save and then click on Create Template in Word at the top of the page. Open the file in Word, and click on CRM under the Add-ins tab.
Select the type of document you want to work with and make your way to step 4, where you can choose the data source from Dynamics 365. You can now find our data from the Insert Merge Field.
Insert the data into your draft file. Here’s an example of what it could look like having chosen the Letter document type in the earlier step.
Next, save the template in Word, go back to the Mail Merge Template screen in Dynamics 365, and attach the Word file to your newly-created mail merge item. Click Save and Close and your draft is complete!
Using the Mail Merge Template
Now that your template is all set, let’s see how to put it into action. Go to Advanced Find, select the customers to whom you want to send your email, and click on the Mail Merge button. Note: If you’re looking to learn about how to use Advanced Find, our recent blog Advanced Find in Microsoft Dynamics 365: Knowing More Than “Where’s Waldo?” can help.
On the following screen, choose your personal mail merge template, click Download, and open the downloaded file in Word. The customers whose information you’ve chosen should now be in Word, as can be seen below.
Now make your way through the step-by-step process in Word. Following these steps, you will be able to see a preview of your message with a sample of the content filled in. Edit as required.
With everything set to your heart’s content, you’re good to go to finish it off. Congratulations! Now you have a template that you can quickly refer to and change as needed. The more customers or prospects each template is relevant towards, the more time you save. How about that?
