Redtail CRM offers subscribers a ton of opportunities to customize their CRM, both at the individual and at the database level. These opportunities for customization are important because they allow you to set your database preferences and lists up in ways that work the best for both you as an individual as well as for your office. Taken together, these customization options will help drive user adoption and, ultimately, help you streamline your processes while at the same time personalize and improve the client experience your firm provides.

You can browse all prior posts in this series here. In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can manage Mail Merge Templates.

Redtail CRM provides you with the ability to upload mail merge templates that you can then use as the basis for labels, envelopes, or form letters which automatically pull your desired data from Redtail contact records. These can prove very useful when sending physical mail to large numbers of your clients.

Let’s take a look at the things you need to know in order to put mail merge templates to work for your office in Redtail CRM.

Create And Upload A Mail Merge Template For Use With Redtail

When you’re ready to begin preparing mail merge templates for use with Redtail, it’s a good idea that you become familiar with what fields Redtail supports as available for mail merge documents. In the links at the bottom of this post, we include a link to available Mail Merge Fields in Redtail CRM.

Preparing Your New Mail Merge Template

Open up Microsoft Word and pull up either a blank document or an existing document that you would like to make available as a Mail Merge template.

Date and Time

If you are preparing a letter or some other document and you want to include the date and/or time, be aware that Redtail has no mail merge field for this because Microsoft Word has this function built in as an Insert. Within Microsoft Word, select Date & Time under the Insert menu. You will then see the dialog box below with many available Date and Time formats from which to choose:

Reason #4:

Your current tools aren’t cutting it. Tasks, processes, or appointments are falling through the cracks, and potentially damaging client relationships.

CRM that is done right has to wear a whole lot of hats. From our 18 years of working with advisors, we know that many of them consider CRM the core solution in their tech stack. With that in mind, with each successive update to Redtail CRM we attempt to either 1) make existing features or functions work even better for our users or 2) introduce something new that will make offices’ day-to-day operations more efficient.

So, what are some examples of tools within Redtail CRM that will help you manage your processes more efficiently and improve your time management, task delegation and accountability, client experience, and overall production?

Calendar

First and foremost, your CRM calendar needs to help you prevent scheduling errors, which can negatively affect your clients’ perceptions of your office. With the Redtail CRM calendar, you can look at everyone’s schedule to know where someone is and what type of meeting or appointment they are attending. Additionally, the color coding options for the calendar make it easy to quickly determine what type of activity or event a given employee is involved with at any given time.

With Redtail’s calendar, it’s also a snap to add multiple employees or linked contacts to any activity you set up, as well as to view Client Reviews, Seminars, Workflow Tasks, Client Birthdays, Marital Anniversaries, and/or holidays all right there in the same place. This overall picture of everything that needs to be taken care of in your office for any timeframe you want to view makes scheduling on-the-fly easier while also providing you with a clear picture of the overall workload in your office.

Templates and customizable lists

Redtail provides you with an easy way to create templates for repeated use for Notes, Activities, Broadcast Emails, Custom Exports, and Mail Merges. Note and Activity Templates are the most recently added of these features; you can dive into a lot greater detail about the efficiencies they introduce into your practice here. Any way you approach it though, as you begin using templates for these different functions within Redtail you will find that you are not only adding time to your day but also adding consistency to the way you manage your business firm-wide, which can improve client experience and build trust. As one user reported (about broadcast email templates), “I absolutely love the email templates that can be used. I can send out my various requests/reminders in a matter of minutes, whereas before I spent about an hour (sometimes more).”

Customizable database lists encourage consistency and improve efficiencies as well. With Redtail you can customize everything from Contact Status and Contact Category to User Defined Fields and Opportunity Stages, all to reflect the way your firm already identifies or labels the various items that relate to your business. By customizing list item names to match the naming conventions already in place within your business, you’ll improve both user adoption and business efficiencies.

Automations

Automations too are quick and easy to set up, but don’t let their simplicity fool you; this is a tool that allows you to automate commonly performed actions based off of other common triggering events occuring within your database. When combined with the power of workflows (which we’ll talk about next), automations can be one of the best tools in your arsenal for preventing things from falling through the cracks. You can check out a recorded webinar on Automations here.

Workflows

One of the main things to consider during the process of CRM selection is that your success with CRM will depend largely upon how well you have mapped out the processes that contribute to your day-to-day operations within the CRM itself.  Contact management is at the heart of CRM, but to truly put your CRM to work within your firm you need to recreate automated procedures within your CRM that reflect your current successful processes.  It’s probably a good idea to begin mapping out these processes while you’re shopping for a solution to your CRM needs – you can then recreate them in demo accounts (with those vendors that provide demos) to see how well a particular CRM will allow you to mirror your processes.

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes: a sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful. ~David McCandless

Mapping out your processes during the CRM search also allows you to see areas where your processes may not be defined clearly enough to achieve consistency as well as areas where your processes may need to be revamped.  You should take the opportunity to critique your current issues with client management and develop the processes that you believe will help you overcome them – when you do deploy your new CRM system you’ll be armed with a set of processes which you can put into action quickly.

The use of workflows in Redtail to digitize your processes allows you to set up precise steps, tasks, and outcomes for each and every process your office may use. This in turn means that whether a process is routine or is performed only occasionally, there is no question about the steps involved or about which team member or members are responsible for each component of a given process.

Additionally, with standard operation procedures built out as workflows, the types of challenges that sometimes arise when team members are away on vacation or out for an extended time can be addressed head-on through workflow reporting and workflow task reassignment.

Further, using automations to trigger the initiation of a specific workflow based upon certain conditions being met is going to dramatically reduce instances of process delays where timing is everything.

Redtail CRM is a tool with a history of success

Great CRM tends to stand out from the crowd over time by actually providing its intended users the tools they need to do their jobs in an efficient manner. The tools mentioned above that Redtail offers advisors are only a small sampling of everything offered across our suite of solutions that will help you keep your business on track.

We didn’t even talk here about reporting, sales/marketing/communications, event planning, or any number of other essential business functions that Redtail can assist with streamlining. But know, as we discussed in Reason #2, that Redtail puts all of these tools at your disposal, and you can incorporate each of them as time allows or the need arises.

Up next week, Reason #5: Your client base has grown to the point where it’s impossible to maintain a cohesive and holistic view of each client using your current methods. In turn, this poses challenges in terms of compliance and missed opportunities.

As always, if you have any questions along the way as we address these, you can reach out to our team at sales@redtailtechnology.com or 800.206.5030. We can’t wait to get to know you and your business better and to show you why Redtail is an industry leader committed to your success!