Integrating your email inbox with Salesforce CRM can be a game-changer, but it's important to do it right. This blog explores the possibilities of email integration and offers an overview of Salesforce's add-ons and advanced functionality, including Salesforce Inbox.
Integrating your e-mail inbox with your CRM platform sounds like the right thing to do. But dumping all your e-mails into the CRM without any kind of consideration will more likely turn your CRM system in a dump than anything else. The value of the logged e-mails would soon be lost.
The challenge at hand consists of linking the most relevant e-mails to the right Salesforce records in a fast, easy and user-friendly manner. Not just linking the mail to the Contact or the Account, but preferably also to the Opportunity, Case or Quote that is discussed in the e-mail.
So it makes sense that Salesforce tries to integrate its system with the most used e-mail clients out there, namely Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail. This is a core functionality when striving for the coveted 360° Customer view!
In this blogpost, I’ll provide you with a short overview of the possibilities that the e-mail integration allows for. You'll see that Salesforce Inbox offers the most advanced functionality however you can already go a long way with the out-of-the-box solutions.
Since the early days, Salesforce has always allowed its users to send e-mails from practically each kind of record. Your e-mails can be sent via Salesforce itself or, since the Summer ‘16 release, there’s also the possibility to send emails via Office 365 or Gmail from within Salesforce.
In specific cases, you can also consider to set up Email Relay to send e-mails from within Salesforce through your company’s e-mail server.
Previously also known as Lightning for Outlook and Lightning for Gmail respectively.
This add-on to your own Outlook or Gmail e-mail client allows you to access Salesforce directly from your inbox. Once installed, you’ll see the Salesforce sidebar which displays contextual information and possible actions, depending on the e-mail you selected.
With just a few clicks you can link the e-mail to several records, including the attachments. In addition, the sidebar also allows you to search your entire Salesforce database or to quickly create new Leads, Tasks, Cases, and so on.
On top of the functionality described above for the Outlook Integration and Gmail Integration, Salesforce Inbox offers some fantastic extras:
The overview wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the time-honored Email to Salesforce address. This is an email address, specific to each user, to which emails can be forwarded in order to log them automatically in Salesforce. More information can be found here.
Last but not least, when you’re working with older versions of Outlook that might not be compatible with Salesforce Outlook Integration, you could still make use of the Salesforce for Outlook connector. More information can be found here.
And when all of the above does not satisfy your requirements and needs you can always look into the heavy duty, marketing automation solutions Salesforce has on offer: Pardot (B2B) and Marketing Cloud (B2C). Although these topics, along with Email-to-Case, will be covered in another blogpost.
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