There are 3 areas you can send an email from in Mercury, and where you email from will dictate what merge content is available and what the merge codes are.
This tool has been designed to help you find the merge codes you require.
Getting Started
Introduction
Existing Email Templates
New Email Templates
Template Body
Using the Merge Code Selection Tool
Getting Started
To get to Dynamic Email Templates, please refer to the following instructions:
Click onto Mercury on the top left toolbar:
This will show all dynamic apps that you have access to. Select Mercury Admin:
Go to the bottom left-hand side corner, click on Recruit, and change this to Config:
This will default to the Dynamic Email templates entity.
Here you will see all the standard dynamic email templates that have been created in your system.
Introduction
We have created a new merge code selector tool to assist in the creation of email templates, but there are some things to note around templates themselves.
We made some enhancements to where information on email can be pulled from. Previously you had a primary and secondary entity but instead this has now been replaced with the ability to draw information from a number of whitelisted records dependants on where you’re sending your email from.To better understand this let’s look at the settings of a template.
Existing Email Templates
The list of current email templates are all ones that relate to workflows. This means that the template is produced based on an action being run in Mercury.
For example, there is a Welcome Email template. If this is one of your chosen templates, it will automatically create this email template when a candidate is created in the system. It will not matter how the candidate is created, whether it is via your job boards, directly sent to DaXtra, manually created or via our LinkedIn integration.
NOTE: Rules can be set around the various triggers.
Your project team will have decided which ones they want to use at the start of the project. If you are unsure which ones are in use, please ask them.
Email Options
Existing emails can be set to auto send based on a workflow or to be being a draft email.
We have two interview emails, one to the client contact and one to the candidate. These are typically set to draft. This gives the user the check the details of the email and personalise it before it is sent. The same applies to the Offer template. These are also set to draft and are the most used templates within Mercury.
Editing Existing Templates
To edit an existing email, navigate to the correct record and double click anywhere onto the row. This will take you into the template:
It will default into the ‘General’ tab. Select the ‘Template Content’ tab to access the body of the email:
From here, the text can be amended, and the toolbar can be used to change fonts, font sizes, etc.
New Email Templates
When creating email templates in Mercury there are certain things we must think of prior to the creation of a template. The first thing is to consider who the email template will be sent to. When sending an email in Mercury you must always look to send to a person and that person can, of course, be a candidate and/or a client contact.
The next thing to consider is which are of Mercury you will send the email from. There are three areas in Mercury that you can email from, the Contact record, the Shortlist record (perhaps triggered from the Shortlist area of a vacancy but still directly associated with a Shortlist not a vacancy) and the Placement record. The different records you send the email from will have a big impact on the merge codes that you use within the template for the dynamic content.
Field Name | Description |
1 Name | The name you’d like to give the template. We recommend prefixing this based on where your template will be sent from. C for Contact Record, S for Shortlist Record and P for Placement Record |
2 Is Sales | Should this template be considered a sales email? If so, check the box. This will prevent it from being sent if a contacts ‘Sales Email’ field is set to ‘Don’t Send’ |
3 Template Type | This will only ever be ‘Email body’ as Signature templates are not supported |
4 Key | You will never complete this field. This is for use by Mercury support to link this template to a workflow |
5 Primary Entity | This is linked to who you’re sending your template to. So, if this template is for candidates, then the Primary Entity will be ‘crimson_candidate’ if it’s to a client contact then the Primary Entity will be ‘contact’ |
6 Secondary Entity | This is no longer used when creating templates as there are now additional whitelisted entities that can be used |
7 Owner | This will populate with whomever is creating the template and can be ignored |
8 Hide in email editor | This will always be ‘No’. Mercury has certain templates that are only available via workflows and so are hidden for selection in the editor |
Once you have completed the required fields on the General Tab, click Save and go to your Template Content tab:
Add the Subject of your email – this will then auto-populate when this email template is selected to be used.
Add the Body of the email template using the merge code selector to find the correct merge fields.
Template Body
When creating templates our advice is that you open the record that you would like to send your template from. This allows you to look at the label of field you’d like to add to your template as the onscreen name may not match the name in the merge code as this comes directly from the database table and so isn’t as easy on the eye.
An example of this is the Work mobile field from a contact record. Whilst the label on screen is ‘Work mobile’ the merge code is actually referring to mobilephone as that’s how it’s labelled in the background.
This is the first place where the merge selection tool comes in as you can simply select the options that provide you with the correct merge code.
The move to the list of Whitelisted entities allows us to lookup information from the records you can email from (Contact, Shortlist and Placement) and retrieve information from any of the Whitelisted entities (Contact, Client, Agreement, Vacancy, Placement, Shortlist, Project, Candidate Company) that they have relationships with.
For example, below you can see the Contact record (which is where my template would be (emailing from) has a field called ‘Client’. This displays the name of the client with which this person works for.
We could merge this information into our template like any other field using the code {{data.parentcustomerid}}, however this particular field is a lookup that opens the door to one of the whitelisted entities (Client Record) meaning we can use it allow us to pull information from the client, such as the city of their primary address, that this person works for using the code {{data.parentcustomerid.address1_city}}
Using the Merge Code Selection Tool
When using the merge code selection tool, you should always work from left to right and repeat this process for each merge code you’d like to find. The first option that you ned to select is where you will be ending your email template from. as you click into each cell there will be a drop-down arrow for you to see which options are available:
The second option is where you will then select which field you would like to use in your template. This could be either simply pulling in the contents of that field or using it to open the door to one of the whitelisted entities described above. As previously you can click the drop down and select from the available options or, if you know what field it is that you would like, then you can simply type within the field to filter the options available:
After selecting your field, the next cell will inform you whether this can be used as a lookup/door to a whitelisted entity and if so which one. Immediately after that is where you can then choose whether you would like to use that field as a lookup or not. If you do choose to use this field as a lookup then the next cell is where you will then choose the field from the whitelisted entity (in the pictured example this is ‘The Client Record’) in the same way you use the first field selector:
The final selection is what format you would like to display the information in. This isn’t always a choice so you may only see ‘N/A’ in here but on occasion there will be alternative options such as whether to a display a number in a standard fashion such as 1234 or in a formatted fashion such as 1,234.
This will now display the merge code you can use for your template which can be pasted in via the plain text option.
Please do not just paste in the merge directly from the Merge Code Selection Tool as this will include hidden formatting that will increase the character count of your template and cause issues. Either paste into Notepad and then copy into the body of your email or use the Paste as Text button within the email editor:
Finally, we have included some test scenarios for you to use to check you know how to use the tool. To use this, first select a scenario and then use the Merge Code Selection Tool to select the merge code that the scenario describes. Keep trying until you get it right!