Salesforce and Emails

Salesforce = CRM. CRM = Customer Relationship Management. Relationship Managements means (at least to me) to store information about activities I do with customers, not just the hard data (such as their names and phone numbers). And emails are pretty crucial activities and a lot of companies solve their „sharing“ by forwarding them to people or putting everyone on a copy. Saving the important emails to Salesforce sounds way more functional to me.

The „why“ is probably pretty obvious – when people leaves company I still have the important emails at one place and don’t have to sift through their mailbox; you don’t have to resend emails to others, they can find it on their own; when new person join company they can see all the historical correspondence; etc. And maybe Einstein will use it to predict the likelihood of making the business happen.

So, how can I get emails to Salesforce?

1. Send them from Salesforce

Well, this works only for the outbound emails, but you need to start somewhere. By default you can send emails from any contact/lead/opportunity – on the right hand side you have the action.

You can use templates (the whole email which might include merge fields so you don’t have to think about people names), quick text (which is quite similar to templates, but usually used for shorter texts), insert files (by default files up to 3MB are sent in email, bigger saved in SF and only link is provided, but you can change this behaviour for individual emails, not mass emails).

Each user can change their signature in settings and also choose whether they want to get emails sent from Salesforce in BCC to their email address. And if you struggle how to get logo into your signature here is some way, which isn’t 100 % user friendly.

You can also choose whether the emails will be send directly from Salesforce or via Gmail/Office 365, you can set relay through your email server, bounce management (should user be notified that the email bounced or is showing it in SF enough), you can also set a hard BCC copy for compliance reasons.

2. Special email address

Second way how to get outgoing emails to Salesforce is to use dedicated email address which you put into BCC of every email you want to record when sending from your regular email client.

Admin just need to enable it in Setup (Email to Salesforce) and each user can find in their settings long ugly email address which they will put into BCC and Salesforce will link the email automatically to contact/lead based on their email address. You can specify what should happen if it will not find the contact as well.

It doesn’t solve the incoming emails but as Salesforce says – you confirm them anyway, so no harm has been done.

3. Outlook/Gmail app

For Outlook (connected to Exchange) and Gmail (the one in Google Apps, not the free one and only for Chrome browser) you can install special extension, which will add a right pane into it. When you open email it will show details from Salesforce and you can set which information you want to see, you can also save the email to SF with one click and save emails you send as well.

You can use templates from Salesforce, create tasks in Salesforce or even new records, pretty handy extension provided by free.

4. Einstein Activity Capture

This works automatically, is free for everyone with up to 100 Sales Cloud Licences and users just need to connect their Gmail/Exchange account with SF.

Magic happens – any email you send or receive is automatically linked to records Einstein decides it should be linked to. Which also means they if it decides there is no link it won’t link the email even though you send it from Salesforce – eg. when you send email from Opportunity but it isn’t linked to contact, the email will not be logged to the opportunity. One more argument to correctly link everything together.

Even more crucial might be, that these emails aren’t saved in SF even though it looks like, they are saved in AWS. Meaning you cannot report based on them and they will also disappear after 6 months, which is pretty bad.

5. Salesforce Inbox and 3rd party apps

The legacy Inbox app has been discontinued and is now part of the extension mentioned in #3 plus there are great 3rd party apps you might want to use, such as Ebsta, Cirrus Insight and others.

They are paid extra and provide extra features as well – automatically update contact info, work on mobile phone, allow customer to choose time for a meeting with you (Salesforce has a Lightning Scheduler add-on for this) and a few other things you probably didn’t need at first but when you check them out you’ll find out you really need them.

What do you use?

How do you link emails to Salesforce and do you or feel it isn’t important? Which app is the best and we all should know about it?

A lot of additional details and comparison of all those approaches put together Brent Downey in his article Lightning Sync vs Einstein Activity Capture.

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