Email Templates

Many times the same email is used over and over again for correspondence with a variety of clients. For example, you may want to send a "Thank You for Booking Me" email after booking a client. Instead of typing this email out for every client, you can save time by creating email templates. With a click of a button, the body of the email will populate with your template. And by incorporating variables into your templates, you can customize the template for each shoot.

To get started creating an email template, navigate to the following:

Settings > Email > Email Templates

In the Email Template section, click the New Email button.

This will open the full Email Template Interface and you can now assign a Name (Internal) that your studio will use to identify the email and a Default Subject Line that will be presented to the client.

The Toolbar is broken into sections, each of which allow you to customize various aspects of the Email. Several sections give you basic control over the appearance of the text of the contract (Bold, Italics and Underline), and font style, size, and color. There are also three justification options for text and images, and there are options for creating bulleted/numbered lists.

Another section allows you three options for advanced customization (Hyperlinks, Images and the Paste from Word feature).

To insert a Hyperlink just highlight the text you would like to represent the link, press the Hyperlink button and type the link URL into the resulting pop-up window. To remove a hyperlink, just highlight the hyperlink in the template and click the "Unlink" button.

You can also add any web-hosted image to the email simply by positioning the cursor where you want the image to appear, clicking on the Image button and typing the image's URL into the resulting pop-up window. Although you can't upload an image from your desktop, this feature will allow you to grab any image that is hosted online (that belongs to you, of course) and add it to your template. Just Control click (for Mac users) or right click (for Windows folks) on the image to copy the image URL and you're all set. You can then resize the image once it is in the email interface, by clicking on it and using the corners to adjust the size it will display. To learn more about inserting image links into emails, go to this article.

Last in this section is the Paste from Word option which is there if you are going to be pasting in your email from its previous home in a Microsoft Word file or another word processing program. When you copy from a word processing program, your copy can carry formatting information over with it which will appear incorrectly when pasted into the template. So, if you are copying from a word processor, just click on the Paste from Word option and paste your email into the resulting pop-up window. This will strip all of that formatting out of the email so that you can get your email looking official in no time.

Now its time to get some Variables in that email. Variables work the same way here as they do for Contracts, so ShootQ will auto-populate any piece of information specifically for the client who the email is being sent to. No more changing names, dates, etc. since ShootQ takes care of that for you! Click the Variable button and you will see there are variables for People and Event Details

Here are the currently available Email Template Variables for both Event Details and People. To insert one into an email template, just click on the appropriate variable.

   

        

If necessary, you can also attach files to an email template by dragging them into the 'Drop Files Here to Upload' section. Click the 'Remove' button to delete them. It's important to note that when an email template is part of a workflow and the workflow is already assigned to a shoot, removing the attachment from the template will not  remove it from the already-scheduled email. It will only affect future shoots that have that workflow assigned. Check out this article to learn more about email attachments.

 

Before long, your Email Templates will look something like this. Notice that the variables appear as blue icons. To remove a variable, simply click on it and hit the Delete button on your keyboard.

 

 

Email Signatures

Once You have Email Templates for any emails you imagine yourself needing to send frequently, take a second and set up some Email Signatures:

Settings > Email > Signatures

On the left, every individual User in your account can set up a unique Signature that will be added to each of the emails that they manually send in ShootQ. On the right, you can configure a generalized brand signature for emails sent automatically from ShootQ (i.e. invoice reminders, workflow correspondence, etc). Both of these signatures are specific to a brand which means you can have different signatures for different brands.

 

Archive Automatic Client Responses

Finally, you may decide that you want to maintain a copy of all email correspondence inside of ShootQ. Since your client's replies are redirected to your main email inbox, we have created a feature that will allow you to track client responses in ShootQ, too. With Client Response Tracking enabled, when a client responds to email sent from ShootQ, their reply will be sent to brand email address and also to the shoot email adddress so that it is archived with the shoot under Correspondence. This feature is in Beta because we cannot guarantee that all email clients will automatically reply to both email addresses.

Just navigate here to enable it:

Settings > Email > Send Emails to Shoots