Have you ever gotten frustrated drafting emails with the same content over and over again? If so, you know that it involves grunt work, consumes a large chunk of your time, and, at the end of it, your team's productivity drops significantly.
Thankfully, you and your team can leverage pre-drafted templates in your shared inbox platform, streamline your processes, and send out emails as fast and efficiently as possible.
Benefits of using email templates
Here are six major benefits of creating email templates that can be used in myriad ways to achieve your organizational goals:
- Respond faster to inbound messages: Your team might receive many information requests, queries, or complaints from both internal and external stakeholders. Response templates allow you to send responses in one click.
- Maintain a unified voice for your team: If you’re a customer-facing team, your team members can use email templates to maintain consistency in the emails that are sent out.
- Reduce human errors: When you are in a hurry to send or respond to emails, you may be more prone to error. Pre-composing your email templates helps you tackle this problem.
- Improve email response rates: Customers prefer email as their primary mode of contact, and they expect a quick response. By using the 'auto-reply with a response template' feature, you can respond promptly and increase your customer satisfaction score in the process.
- Focus on high-priority tasks: Template your email responses to sift through the mundane work of responding to emails. This will free up your time to focus on the important tasks at hand, thereby increasing your team’s productivity.
- Personalize emails the way you want: One thing that could double the perks of email templates is personalization. Increase your emails' open rate and engagement rate by giving a personal touch to your templates as you compose the email.
Which teams can use email templates?
In most organizations or businesses, the entire workforce at large can benefit from templating at least some of their email responses. These teams in particular can increase their productivity and efficiency using a wider variety of email templates.
HR teams
HR teams are used to sending and receiving plenty of emails to and from employees, job applicants, and external stakeholders. Managing huge volumes of email can be overwhelming. Teams can speed up the HR emailing process by creating email templates for use cases such as job offers, interview result announcements, onboarding, employee welcome emails, training invitations, event reminders, and job promotion emails.
Customer support teams
Customer support teams, irrespective of size, receive similar complaints or queries from users. Because the user is always looking to receive prompt and reliable solutions, teams should proactively create email templates for standard troubleshooting procedures so that they can deliver fast responses, which will eventually lead to delighted customers. This will also ensure consistency in the replies and reassure the trust that the customers have in the brand or company.
Marketing teams
Emails are an integral part of every marketing team. Whether it’s communicating internally within an organization, getting in touch with your customers, or sending campaigns to generate leads, the success of every marketing activity depends on how well you draft your emails. Some marketing email templates that you can create include customer welcome emails, user education emails, newsletter subscription emails, event announcement emails, account/subscription cancellation emails, and promotional emails.
Sales teams
Across all industries, the highest click-to-open rates of emails is a measly 21.45%. This is concerning for people involved in sales because if prospects don’t even open the email, how are they going to know about the value that their product offers? When it comes to drafting cold email templates or follow-ups, sales teams have to be creative and stand out from the crowd to generate higher open rates, click-through rates, and response rates from their prospects. Teams can pre-compose a set of email templates based on certain situations and stack them in their armor so that when an opportunity comes, they can make a few edits and simply fire them off.
Sysadmin teams
System administrators receive a lot of inbound emails, usually when things are slow, when something crashes, or when there are hardware/software requests. During those times, sysadmins have to deliver help and services as swiftly as possible. A few potential areas where sysadmins can use email templates in their shared inboxes include communicating security malware, installation updates, asset requests, standard troubleshooting procedures, planned and unplanned downtimes, and so on.
Legal teams
Legal teams have to be extra cautious and meticulous when it comes to drafting email templates, solely because of the sensitivity of the matter at hand and the potential stakeholders that could be impacted. When an employee requests crucial documents or has queries regarding standard processes in an organization, the legal team can pick from a library of pre-drafted templates to make emails error-free, thereby ensuring credibility.
Note: This is not an exhaustive list. There are many other teams that could make use of email templates to boost their performance.
Email templates for personal use
Few shared inbox tools like Zoho TeamInbox provide a personal inbox, which opens the door for creating email templates for personal use. Whether you’re sending out replies that don’t involve much thought or legwork, sending commonly used attachments upon request, or auto-replying when you’re not available or out of office—email templates are the perfect solution for foolproof communication.
Automating email responses
According to a McKinsey Global Institute survey, the average interaction worker spends over 28% of their work week—or nearly a third of their total working hours—managing email. A productive team always looks out for opportunities to automate so that they can better utilize their time working on tasks that matter. Email responses are one such area of their work that can be automated.
When there’s a service request or a department-specific request, teams can automate the reply process in such a way that when a particular keyword is present in the subject line or the email, a response template is automatically triggered and sent as a reply.
Email signatures—the cherry on the cake
If an email template is a well-blended mix of consistency, conciseness, and creativity, then the email signature is the cherry on top (or on the bottom, literally!). Including email signatures in every email gives a personalized human touch to the message, displays professionalism, builds trust and relationship with the recipient, and helps in brand/company recognition.
Wrapping up
Email templates help a great deal in saving time, streamlining your processes, maintaining a unified voice across your team, reducing human errors, and improving email response rates. Pre-defined templates and email signatures are an ideal combination to send out emails in the most effective way possible, whereas automating email templates is one of the first automation quick wins for your team.
Try these features out in Zoho TeamInbox, a shared inbox platform that facilitates effective collaboration and communication. With plenty of intuitive, inbox-friendly features, seamless integration with other applications, and a flexible pricing plan, Zoho TeamInbox is a useful addition to your tool stack.
Excited about shared inboxes? Try Zoho TeamInbox's 14-day free trial. If you have any questions or feedback to share, or would like to schedule a product demo, feel free to email us at support@zohoteaminbox.com.
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