Question:

I want to send e-mails to my Leads and Contacts from within Salesforce with my standard e-mail signature, but the OOB e-mail signature does not support HTML.  I want to add a mailto and website link as well as our company logo, any ideas?

Answer:

You can achieve this with an HTML e-mail template per user or you can setup one template all your users can use.  We are going to walk you through how to do this for all users and extend the user object to really step this up a notch.

Steps:

1.)     As an admin user, setup your organizational letterhead (Setup -> Communication Templates -> Letterheads).  In this demonstration we are setting up a blank letterhead, but feel free to customize it as you wish.  Make sure you mark it as active for use.

2.)     Create a new Document to maintain your company logo image.  You have to actually upload an image to Salesforce to use within an e-mail template, adding the link to the external image doesn’t work.

3.)     As an admin user, customize your User object to provide a new Text Area (Rich) field called Email Signature Additional Info.  This is where we can maintain custom info that a user may want included in their e-mail signature (e.g. Salesforce.com Administrator Certified).  By using a Text Area (Rich) field users can embed images and links.

4.)     As an admin user, setup your custom HTML e-mail template called “User Template” (Setup -> Communication Templates -> Email Templates).  You need to select your letterhead you created in step one.  In the demo we illustrate how to merge User and Organizational information into your template.  Make sure to save this template to the Unfilled Public Email Templates so all users have access to it.

5.)     Test your work.  Open an existing Lead or Contact then click the Send an Email button.  Click the Select Template button and select your new “User Template” template.  After selecting the template the subject and content is populated.  You can place your cursor inside either of these fields and make changes as needed.  When you are done drafting the e-mail click the Send button and verify everything looks OK for the recipient (first test with a Lead or Contact with an e-mail address you have access to).

Notes:

– We tried experimenting with using Custom or Visualforce e-mail templates for this, but they don’t allow you to edit the content of the message after selecting the template.  You can only edit the content when using Text or HTML based e-mail templates.  Using an HTML based e-mail template requires using a letterhead.  You have to first create and activate the letterhead before trying to create the e-mail template.

– If you want your users to be able to edit the content of the e-mail after selecting the template make sure you don’t click the lock icon when setting up the e-mail template.

– This procedure has been tested in December 2012 on the Group and Enterprise Editions.