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December 01, 2002 at 02:00 AM
Do you spend time composing e-mails over and over again that say almost exactly the same thing? Here’s a time-saving solution: It’s a software plug-in for Outlook called Email Templates. I’ve been using it for almost a year and it works well.
Let’s say that you send an e-mail five times a day to a custodian, broker/dealer, client, or vendor confirming an order, thanking them for their help, or telling them you are faxing something. Or say you take an ad in the newspaper providing an e-mail address for resumes and you want to automate a response to candidates. Or maybe you have a standard e-mail you want to send to prospects. Using Email Templates (www.emailtemplates.com), you can draft an e-mail one time and save it in a separate Outlook folder to be sent over and over again hundreds of times.
When you want to send the template e-mail as a reply or as a new piece of mail, you just click on a toolbar that Email Templates puts in your Outlook toolbar, and it pops open your template e-mail for you to personalize or send as is.
One feature that is great about this program is that you can insert elements into your e-mail to personalize it. For instance, when you set up a template e-mail to reply to a request for information about your firm, include in your reply the name of the sender of the original e-mail, include the body of the original message to you, the date the message was sent to you, and other elements of the original e-mail. This allows you to personalize template replies easily.
I switched from using Eudora as my e-mail software program to Microsoft Outlook one year ago. Eudora was great for creating e-mail templates because you could easily create “stationery” that would contain your repetitive messages and use that to create template e-mails. I was annoyed and disappointed that Outlook made this much more difficult. I spent several hours trying to create a simple solution in Outlook and asked a network consultant who installs Microsoft Exchange and Office for a living in small businesses how to create templates, but I could not find a simple solution.
