Best practice with ContactBuilder: online forms and personalised emails

On the surface, online forms and personalising emails with placeholders are vastly different. Of course, they are - but what makes them similar? They both utilise ContactBuilder’s contact records to auto-populate a document. For example, when your sale reaches the reservation stage and you need to fill out the contract, much of the information needed for the form is contained within the contact record saving you (and your buyers) time on data entry. 

Online forms allow you to further digitise the customer journey once the form has been set up for use. As a reservation form is a standard form, we have included it with your ContactBuilder account. You will want to make the appropriate changes to the document to customise it for your needs, but the majority of the work has already been done for you. Other useful forms and letters included are the sale handover checklist, house sale details, a memorandum of sale, and for housing associations, a staircasing form.

To alert your buyer that the online form is available for them to review, it’s best practice to send an email. An email template enables you to use placeholders for personalisation allowing you to create an email that covers your needs, suits your tone of voice, all while ensuring consistency across every sale, and this type of email can easily be automated with our customer journey module.

Why personalise? Today, recipients are more likely to respond and react favourably to a personalised email, one that uses their name and has content tailored to them, whether it’s for general marketing emails or correspondence specific to their sale. This is not just something you should aspire to have; this is a need as it’s an expectation of your audience. 

Email templates are an important tool in your arsenal, and they can be created for a variety of interactions including appointment confirmations, payment reminders, reservation next steps, and even that all important initial enquiry acknowledgement. Putting in the effort to create the email for your team is well worth it, as it will save them time in the long run. 

If you have any questions or just want a bit of advice regarding online forms or email templates speak to your account manager and they will be more than happy to help.