Digital-Clay Community Forum

We have a contact network in which people know our office by different "hats" we wear. For someone, we might be a government agency and for another we might be a private consulting firm, etc.

For each of these identities, our office has a different signature that would be appropriate.

Therefore, there are occasions on which we want to send out some kind of mail message (whether mass or merge mail) to a group of people: All of them should receive the same message content, while each person should end up with the appropriate signature appearing at the end of the letter (or letterhead depending on the context). Ideally all would be sent out at once, even though the nature of our relationship with them might be different.

How would you recommend going about this?

I was thinking to make a custom field within contacts of "signature," based on a custom table of signatures (perhaps pictures? signatures usually include a logo and text). That way, we could choose one for each contact.

Then a template would have to be made each time that would call the field "signature" at the end and insert the proper signature for each person.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

That would be exactly how I would do it. A custom table+linked field in Contacts. Unless EVERY contact has its own signature in which case I would put the fields inside the Contact table.

As part of the signature you can include a Notes field which can even contain HTML formatting code, and you can include a Picture field in a Document Template even if it is one link away as long as you make the topic for the template 'Contact'.

I should add: In most cases, the signature is determined by the contact's entity (i.e. company or organization) such that it would seem to be more direct to put the field in the Entity table.

We email entities or contacts. Therefore, either way, we would want the template to bring the signature associated with the entity (even for its contacts). Should it work as long as the mail template is based on Entity? But would we still have access to fields from Contact in the template if we are sending the email to a contact, as opposed to an entity?

To show Picture fields inside a Template it would need to be maximum one level away and in a direct one-to-many link from the base table. I.e. you can put the signature fields in the Entity table itself and create the template for the Contact table as long as the Contact is linked to Entity through a one-to-many linked field in the Contact table.

There are several variations here depending on what you are planning to do exactly and what the base table (topic) for the template must be. You could also make a template for Entity. If you cannot reach the signature fields from your base table because of a many-to-one link, you can also copy the linked field value to a Signature record from one record to another using Automation. Etc.