Sending Template Based E-mails From BCM

Creating messages and letters from pre-defined templates is a common task performed in CRM and contact management software applications. Templates are a valuable tool for streamlining your marketing communications and activities. In this post last April, I posted about how it is not readily apparent how to accomplish this in Business Contact Manager (BCM) and I offered a work-around using the Quick Part feature. Since then I’ve learned more about BCM so I thought I would provide an update.

I have 3 broad categories text that I like to reuse:

Personalized content – you have "boiler plate" forms that you want to personalize with contact specific info (name, company, etc.). Mail merge is usually the best tool for this job. I covered mail merge with BCM in a previous post.
Snippets (sentences or paragraphs) of text that you often repeat. An example may be directions or product description snippets. Quick Parts are a good tool for this common message fragments.
Messages that, by and large, don’t change depending on the recipient. An example may be a generic response to a request for information.

In many contact management systems, you create a template based message by selecting something like "Create Message From Template". In BCM it’s a little harder to find because BCM calls them Forms. Let’s create a template first and then figure out how to use it to create a new message.

Creating a template is fairly straight forward. Start by creating a new mail message. Add your subject, message, attach files, etc. Choose Save As… from the menu and save the message as an Outlook Template (*.oft).

To create a new message from this template, you need to select a Form. You can do this through the File | New menu

or the Tools | Forms menu

On the Choose Form dialog, change the Look In option to User Templates in File System, select the template you want to use and click open.

That’s all there is to it. By the way, there really isn’t anything specific to BCM here – since BCM is built on top of Outlook, you can use these techniques to create and use templates in Outlook even if you don’t use BCM.