Tis the season to send mass emails.  So as I am slicing and dicing our lead and customer list I am noticing a number of quirks that are hurting our productivity.  The first thing is the Zoho "almost perfect" curse where there is a great feature that is just not thought out all the way through and causes pain.  Search on my name if you want more info on the little things that kill.

So the mass email functionality works great except for a few things that make it almost impossible to automate.  Bear with me:

For the most part sales people are not going to have the skills necessary to create the criteria to mass email, it is going to have to be done by an admin.  Agreed? 

If an admin is going to send it then it would be desirable to have the mass email come from the proper sales rep/lead owner and have the signature of the proper sales rep/lead owner.  Agreed?

One way to accomplish this would be for the admin to create a separate view for each rep/lead owner AND a separate email template for each rep with the personalized signature at the bottom of each template.  That is a LOT of extra work and creates email template and custom view bloat.

Another way to do this would be to create one list and one email template for the specific campaign and have the admin just add the lead owner to the list sort and the from, reply to fields to the same lead owner as the list, check the Add User signature box and send away.  Eliminates all the extra emails and custom list views and send a nice personalized email.  Except Add User Signature will add the signature of the user NOT the Lead Owner/Rep.  I learned of this fact the hard way.

OK, lets look at the problem another way.  What if the admin could set up the custom view list with a wild card for logged in user instead of named user?  That way they could create a custom view once but it would work correctly with all lead owner reps. 

While we are on the wild card topic why not have a wild card for the email template that = current logged in user?  That way the admin would only have to create one template that would work for all users.  They could send their own emails and the signature would be correct.

The Almost Perfect gap is that the current system does not allow for custom list or email template wild cards or offer the option to have the signature be from someone other than the user.

So the only way that I am aware of to send a personalized mass email is to either train all the people on my sales staff the intricacies of custom list views so they can send their own mass emails or create a custom list and email template for each lead owner/rep for each campaign I want to send.   

So If I have four sales reps and I am sending out three different campaigns on four different days I have to create 48 different views and 48 different email templates?  Does that sound right?  The point is that by crossing the Almost Perfect gap Zoho could eliminate a lot of the extra work and bloat with what sounds like a simple fix.

Anyone else having these issues?  Did I miss anything?  Anyone know of a good workaround?  Please speak up.

The somewhat Ironic thing is I wrote 1,000 word blog post on "How D-Tools uses the Mass Email Functionality in Zoho CRM" so I could share with the world and carefully document this process so others on the D-Tools team could manage it.  At that time I thought the Add user signature function would add the From sig, not the actual user.  Just as I posted it to the world (and soon redacted) one of my reps asked if I meant to send an email from him with my signature at the bottom. 

Almost perfect, sigh.....

Adam Stone