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Customer Story
Traditionally mail merge features have been used to produce mass mailings in a short period of time. Lately I have had several customers find great value in using the TrackVia mail merge feature using only 1 record as opposed to the typical dozens or hundreds of records.
One example of this is a mortgage company who sent us one of his contracts that had mutliple places for his client's name, social security number, the property address, phone number, etc. By creating the fields in TrackVia and constructing the contract with ~place holders~, this customer is able to produce auto-populated contracts for his clients instantly. In many cases, the client's information comes directly from the web form on their website so they never have to type it in.
It's a great example of making a powerful tool in TrackVia even better.
Comments
We've been doing this with three of our companies that use TrackVia.
We use it to generate contracts, canned emails (templates), proposals, estimates.
The only thing that I would change/add is the ability to mail merge to PDF or to an email program like outlook or thunderbird.
Right now our agents are just using the old "Ctrl + A" - "Ctrl + C" - " "Ctrl + V" to migrate the document from Word to Outlook, or print to PDF from word to generate PDF. It works but does take time get it done.
You can also use our Email Campaign tool to send personalized messages from TrackVia. This can merge in fields to the template just like the mail merge feature and uses the same naming convention. These templates just need to be created as HTML or Plain Text files. Avoid using Word to produce either.
Matt,
Is it possible to just send one email using the Email Campaign feature? The convenience of the "Mail Merge" feature is that you can mail merge directly from the "view record" screen (top right corner).
You can send these to a single record but it is not as easily done as the mail merge. You would have to create a filtered view that contains just that record and then send the campaign using that view. This tool is mainly meant for mass mailings instead of single emails. For the sake of total disclosure, we also want to mention that for each campaign you will incur a minimum charge of $1.00
I am considering using TrackVia for my company and will mainly be using it to generate quotes that need to be generated individually. One of the things that would help the most would be to have the ability to generate the mail merge directly as a pdf (and since you generate pdf's other places, this should be trivial for your programmers to implement). While having the ability to export into MS Word is great, having the portability of a pdf as well as knowing that they will be sent 'as-is' with no editing first is a great way to make sure that everything is put into our database instead of being edited by hand before being sent to the customer. While it's easy to generate a pdf from a MS Word document, it adds several steps including saving the document to disk and then attaching it to an email.
This is the main thing keeping me from signing up for an account at this time.
Louis
We have this on our roadmap of enhancements to make but cannot give you a date when you can expect to see this in TrackVia.