How To: Take Advantage of E-mail Templates & Merge Keys

One of the most underused yet useful features is the e-mail template maker. Beyond the many pre-designed e-mail templates that are available to you, you can conveniently make your own as well! E-mail templates can be used for a variety of things, can be re-used over and over and can be easily edited to suit different target markets if applicable. You can send these templates to all of your clients with a simple click, or to a group of contacts, or to a select few – whichever you prefer!

Birthday and holiday e-cards, open house visit thank-yous, new listing notices, newsletters, and more – there is no limit to how far your creativity can take you with e-mail templates. Want to schedule an e-card to automatically be sent out to a contact on his or her birthday or on the anniversary of their closing date? You can do that too!

Below is an example of a ‘New Listing’ template that I recently created. Let me break down the elements of the template. 

Merge keys are often confused to be ‘errors’ and people always want to know how to ‘fix’ them. Actually, merge keys, although they look like a bunch of letters and percent signs, are used to import data from a listing, a contact record or from your account details, into the e-mail template, so they are intended to be there. In the screenshot above, you can see all the original merge keys displayed and how they translate in the final e-mail that the recipient sees. You can view all the available merge keys by going to ‘E-mail’ > ‘E-mail Templates’ > ‘Create New Template’ > ‘View Merge Keys’ (located right above the rich text box).

Here is what the final e-mail would look like!

For additional information on e-mail templates, please check out our Prospecting & E-mail Campaigns training course currently available free of charge to all of our Real Web Agent and Real Web Brokerage clients.

Written by: Sevi Najafova, Client Relations