Marketing – Creating a Marketing Template

Marketing messages need to be interesting, clear, and consistent in order to be most effective. In the BNTouch CRM, you can use Templates in your marketing campaigns to design unique email and print media stationery, apply styles uniformly to multiple types of communication, and even create entire reusable letters and messages for various marketing purposes.

To manage your office’s marketing templates, open the Marketing Tab in your CRM, then click the “Templates” sub-tab. If you don’t see it listed, click the “More” menu in the upper-right corner to view any hidden sections.

Here, you will see a list of all templates in your system. Templates represent reusable designs for your marketing messages. Each template will display in the list below, along with the user who created it, its type, sharing status, and group.

BNTouch divides templates into two types: “Letter” and “Design”. A “Design” template functions like a type of stationery; it is a style and format that can be applied to emails or letters sent from your CRM to make them look more interesting or official than just a plain-text message. A “Letter” template, on the other hand, is a complete email or letter that can be sent to your clients and partners whenever you need to. This can be helpful when you send similar messages to many clients for a single purpose, as you don’t need to re-type and design your marketing material every time you send it.

Templates can also be configured for “Public” use or only your own. In the “Public” column, “Yes” means that the template has been made available to all users in your office. “No” signifies that the template is only available to you, its creator.

Your account may already have templates listed on this page; these have been added to your account or created for your use by your administrator.

BNTouch has several pre-made templates available for everyone to use. You can add these for your own use (or for other users if you are an administrator) in the Options tab of your CRM. If you would like to learn more about importing these to your account, please watch our “Predefined Templates” video in our “Options Tab” series.

In addition to importing pre-made templates, you can also create your own. If you want to use another template as a starting point, just open the Actions Menu icon to the right, then click “Copy as New Template”. You can then edit the new template by opening the Actions Menu again and clicking “Edit”. If you want to start a new template from scratch, just click the “Add New Template” button above the list.

When creating or editing a template, you will see a screen much like a Marketing Step editor. Your first step is to enter a Name and Subject. The “Name” is for your own organizational use; clients will not see this. The “Subject” field will be the title of the email or letter for marketing that uses this template. As such, it should only be used for “Letter”-type templates and not for “Design” templates.

If you want to design a piece of marketing that will be completely copied when used, like a Birthday Card, choose “Letter” for the type. If you want this to be a style that can be applied to any other form of communication like stationery, choose “Design”. Next, choose whether you want the template to be “Public” for all users in your office or for your own “Private” use. You can choose to put the template into a “Group” using the drop-down menu. This is also just for your own organizational use.

In the text editor below, you can design your template just like a Marketing campaign step. You can type anything you’d like included whenever this template is used, insert pictures, links, and videos, and use meta-tags to pull relevant information. If this template is a “Design” type and will be used to apply to other marketing communications, you can use the “##TEXT##” meta-tag to identify where the message text will appear in the template. Similarly, you can use the “###SIGN###” tag to insert your email signature.

If you already have a design created using HTML markup, you can simply import it instead of recreating the design. In that case, just open the “Tools” menu in the text editor and click “Source Code”. Paste the HTML text into the pop-up message, then click “OK” to import it to the text editor.

Once your template is complete, click the “Update Template” button above or below to save your changes.

You will be returned to the Templates List of your Marketing Tab, and the new template you designed will be listed. From here, you can always copy, edit, or delete a template using the Action Menu icons to the right of the list.

If you want to clean up your template list, you can mark templates that you don’t need to see here as “Hidden” using the checkboxes to the left and the “Actions for Selected Documents” menu above the list. Templates that you “Mark as Hidden” aren’t deleted, but they will not appear in this list by default. You can view hidden templates using the “Visible” drop-down menu in the upper-left corner. If you need to make any templates visible again, just check their boxes and click the “Mark as Visible” button. You can change sharing status for templates this way, too, as well as delete those that you no longer use. These options will also appear in the Action Menu to the right of each template.

Using the menus at the top of the template list, you can view visible, hidden, or all templates, see only those created by specific users, or filter the list by the date the template was created. You can also enter search terms in the “Name” field and click “Apply Filter” to find templates that match all of the criteria you have set in these menus.

Any template groups that you have added templates to will appear as sub-tabs above the list. You can click on these tabs to show only templates in that Group, and you can add or edit groups by clicking the Edit icon to the right. Similarly, any templates that have been deleted will be saved in a separate group that you can access by clicking “Deleted” in the upper-right corner.

In addition to the template list view, you can also choose to display each of your marketing templates with preview thumbnails using the “Block View” toggle. This will change the format of the list below, but you can still use the checkmarks to modify multiple templates at once, open the Actions Menu for a template, and preview it by clicking the thumbnail or blue template name.

Once you have added templates to your account, they will be available whenever you are creating or editing marketing campaign steps or composing email messages.

Depending on your account settings and the configuration of the campaign, you may have a default template set for some forms of communication. If the “Template” menu is greyed-out when editing a message, this means that the selected default template is being applied. This can only be changed by editing the campaign, so please contact your administrator if you need help.

If a campaign isn’t using a default template, you can select from all templates in your account using the “Template” drop-down menu. These templates will be organized by the Group that they have been added to. You can always see what the template will look like by clicking the “View” link to the right. Even if you don’t end up applying a template, you can still add the material from it to your message by clicking the “Paste” link, which will add all of the template’s material to the text editor below.