Anybody can easily send any of your beautiful Student CRM email templates out via their own Gmail account.
Scenario: Let's say you have just emailed out your university's email newsletter to thousands of prospective students from within Student CRM, and now some of your colleagues in another department would like to send it to their own Gmail contacts, but not from within Student CRM.
Let's walk you through how you would help a colleague to send one of your amazing email templates via their own Gmail account.
1. You get the preview URL
Every email template you create in the Template Builder app in Student CRM gives you a preview URL. This is so you can ask your (kinder) colleagues to check it for you in their browser, without them having to log in to Student CRM themselves. Previewing and testing emails is always a good idea. Remember: measure twice, cut once.
(Of course, this is as well as the 'email to a colleague' feature that is built in, so you can email your template to a colleague's inbox as a real email.)
So, the first thing to do is to find your email template and give your colleague its preview URL. Two clicks and that is easily done.
2. Your colleague views the preview URL in their browser
In this example you can use an email I received from Pizza Hut ages ago. I love pizza and this is a fancy-looking email. We shall pretend you created this email design.
So this is that preview URL: https://crm.student-crm.com/templates/templates/public_template_view/c726a09d-0005-11e7-8884-040191f04201. Feel free to click it.
Side note: this also demonstrates how easy it is for any user to import email templates from anywhere into the Template Builder app in Student CRM. Importing it only took me 30 seconds to do, and now this Pizza Hut template is sitting in my Template Builder app, as a training example.
3. Your colleague updates a setting in their Gmail
In their own Gmail, they click on Settings>Labs (or 'Settings>Advanced' depending on which version of Gmail you are running, both 'Labs' and 'Advanced' do the same thing.) Your colleague enables 'Canned responses (templates)' and closes settings, as below:
4. Your colleague gets the design into Gmail
With 2 browser tabs open - one for Gmail and the other previewing the email online - your colleague clicks anywhere into the page displaying the email, taking care not to click a link in the email as all links are live.
They then 'select all', and the design highlights and they then 'copy'. The template is now copied into their PC's clipboard. Back into their Gmail tab they can now compose a new email and, inserting their cursor in the body, they simply paste from clipboard, and the Pizza Hut email appears, in all its glory.
5. Your colleague saves their first canned response
In the 'more options' icon, bottom right (the 3 vertical dots, see them?) your colleague clicks and selects 'canned responses > new canned response...'
It uses your subject line as the email's name, but you can change this if you want.
You can now send that email or discard it. Either way, the canned response is now saved forever.
6. Use it over and over again
Next time your colleague wants to send that 'Fancy a pizza today?' email out, they click 'compose' and then simply click on the 'more options' icon, bottom right (remember those 3 vertical dots?) and can now insert, delete or save a new one.
7. What's with all the 'your colleague' references?
OK, I'll explain.
As a Student CRM user, you can send emails out easily from Student CRM. Targeted, designed, personalised, tracked emails. Easy-peasy.
But some of your colleagues who don't have a Student CRM user account of their own* might want to do their own thing with your beautiful creations. The article above explains how they can do just that.
(* since every Student CRM software subscription comes with unlimited users you could, of course, just set them up with a user account of their own.)