E-mail marketing is widely practiced by marketers today; it involves sending targeted and personalized e-mail messages to customers. Personalization is a key to successful e-mail marketing because it creates a sense of personal connect between the company and the customer. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides the e-mail template feature that enables marketers to send the same e-mail to a list of recipients with personalization by substituting specific areas of the e-mail body with the relevant customer information.

Consider a scenario where a company is sending marketing e-mails to its credit card customers with new diner offers. One option would be to simply send an e-mail to all target customers with the offer information, by adding personalized information, such as the customer's name and the name of the restaurant last visited based on credit card usage history. Personalized information makes the customer feel special and creates a trust relationship by creating a perception of having received the e-mail from an individual and not some autogenerated messaging system.

E-mail templates are frequently used in e-mail marketing for automated delivery of personalized emails. As shown in the following screenshot, when distributing e-mails, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides the option to use templates and allows selection from a list of available e-mail templates. Also, it's possible to create custom e-mail templates for distributing emails.

Using e-mail template for distributing e-mail activities