Email marketing is nothing without nice-looking emails. You want your subscribers to sit up and lean forward to view your email across the fold. And speaking of nice emails, Salesforce Email Template Builder is your best bet.
New to Template Builder? No fear! In this post, we will gently walk you through the Salesforce Template territory. By the end of this write-up, you will be able to make Salesforce templates work wonders for your email campaigns. To begin with, here’s how the email template builder looks.
Considerations before Setting up Email Template Builder
If you are using the Lightning email composer, you can use the template builder for the following:
- Sending one-to-one emails on Sales Cloud
- Setting up Email-to-case
- Writing emails in the Docked Email Composer
- Global email action
- Setting up Sales Engagement with cadences
- Sending list emails
However, you cannot use the template builder for Experience Cloud sites and Gmail or Outlook integrations. Internet Explorer 11, Enhanced Letterheads, and API are not supported.
You cannot add more than 250 custom components per email template; more than 100 components per region; more than 10k characters for each component’s property value.
Assign Users Who can Work in The Template Builder
First, determine who, apart from you, can work in the Template Builder. Then, follow these simple steps to give them the Access Drag-and-Drop Content Builder permission:
- Go to Setup. Enter “Permission Sets” in the Find Settings box, and select Permission Sets.
- Create a permission set, and then click System Permissions.
- Next, click Edit, select the Access Drag-and-Drop Content Builder permission, and click Save. If needed, you can also assign a permission set to users, as shown below.
(In Salesforce, a permission set is a group of permissions for using a particular functionality or feature relative to a permission set license.)
Showing Around Salesforce Email Template Builder
Let’s quickly show you around Template town. You may have to come back to this quite a few times before it becomes as easy as falling off a log. Refer to the screenshot below.
- Back button: To go back to Salesforce and email templates
- Preview Mode: To preview your template in desktop and mobile mode.
- Salesforce Help: To see documentation, watch videos, and other Salesforce resources.
- Components Console: To see the available components for your template.
- Canvas: Your main template area.
- Default row: Components are placed in a row. This is the default row for a new template.
- Property Console: To make or edit changes in a component.
Creating and Editing Emails in Template Builder
If you want to create and edit Salesforce templates in Lightning Experience. Just follow these two simple steps:
- Start an email, and then click the Template icon in the email compose.
- Choose a template from the Email Template Builder.
When you need to create and edit a catch-all template for sending emails common to your entire organization, follow these steps:
- Head over to the Email Templates home.
- Click New Email Template. You will have to enter template details.
- That done, save your changes. Then click Edit in Builder, as shown in the screenshot below.
Basic Guidelines for Using Template Builder in Salesforce
It is important to note that the Builder comes with its own set of limitations relative to your design and marketing goals. To avoid surprises, note the following considerations:
- Owing to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in HTML templates, you can’t deploy active content in an HTML or Rich Text component.
- You can only enter merge fields manually since no merge field picker is available for editing a rich text component and for the subject line.
- When you’re editing a rich text component, the image upload selector is not available. The .SVG image file type is not supported.
- If you want to save a template as a new template, the latter will be a Lightning template, as distinct from the Email Template Builder.
- Salesforce allows you to clone a Builder template. Now, if one has the Access Drag-and-Drop Content Builder permission, the cloned template is a Template Builder template. If not, the cloned template is a Lightning template.
- If the template width is less than 320px, it will be rendered in phone mode.
- Note that sending an email that uses an Email Template Builder will undercut its responsiveness in Gmail, and possibly in a few other email clients.
- Never open Email Template Builder simultaneously on two tabs. It will result in unsaved or overwritten changes. Ditto when two users are editing the same template simultaneously.
- If you want, you can use keyboard shortcuts. Just press Alt + 0 (for Windows) or Option + 0 (for Mac) to see all the keyboard shortcuts in the rich text editor.
- Barring customer data, you must NOT enter Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in any template or content.
Wrapping up!
You are all set technically to navigate Salesforce Template Builder. If it seems a bit complex, it’s simply because Salesforce is no more complex than that. Unless you are a Salesforce rookie, commanding the Template Builder should not be too hard.