CRM Reviews: Salesforce Email

Salesforce

The Customer Service features of Salesforce Email will give you efficient and high quality communications. Salesforce integrates with popular Email clients like Outlook, and you can provide templates for your agents, automatically assign emails to leads, contacts and other records. You are limited to 1,000 contact emails per day, and Salesforce further limits the number of addresses you can include in a single mass mailing.

Transactional Emails

The basic Salesforce email settings and templates are easy to understand. You plug in your email address, tell the system if you want BCC’s of the emails, and put in a text ‘signature’. Creating templates is just about as easy, you first pick text or HTML email, then you plug in basic descriptive info and finally you key in the subject and body of the email. When you are building the template body you can use a little selection box to find the merge field names, like {!Contact.FirstName}, which you then cut and paste into the body of your email, but this is not available when you edit a template. The last steps are to send a test make the template Available For Use.

To send an individual email, just click the Send an Email button on the contact page and pick a template. Bulk emails are almost as easy – first pick ‘Mass Email Contacts’, then select or create a filtered View of the desired contacts, then pick a template, give a name to the batch, and choose whether to send now or later.

Salesforce lets you arrange templates in folders. This is crucial if you have a large number of templates. When you are looking for templates the folders give you a starting point, and you can search on template descriptions within the folders.

The free Extended Mail Merge integrates with Microsoft Office, for better styling, envelopes and labels. It works for all browsers (MM is just MSIE), and it has an option to copy resulting word doc into Documents tab.

Marketing

Like most CRM’s, the built-in email system will handle individual emails and small blasts to existing customers. Beyond that, you need an Email Service Provider (ESP) or a Marketing Automation system.

The long history of Salesforce with independent partners really shows in the bulk Email offerings. Some are inexpensive batch senders, other products feature rich and premium priced. Things to consider when you pick an ESP are: how easy is it to get the contacts to the ISP, and get the results back into Salesforce? Are the ESP campaigns integrated with Salesforce campaigns? Should the ISP send formatted emails directly from pages within Salesforce, for one-time and small-batch needs?

Management

Salesforce comes out-of-the-box with Gmail and Outlook integration. Replies to email can automatically create Activity entries for opportunities, leads, contacts or all three, using the Email to Salesforce feature (for Enterprise or higher editions.) Email to Salesforce will automatically attach inbound emails to related Salesforce records. If it can’t find a match, Email to Salesforce puts the email in Unresolved Items where you can individually look up emails and attach related records. This could be tedious if you get lots of unmatched emails, it would be nice to have a drag-and-drop feature that could handle multiple emails.

For individual sales reps, out-of-the-box Salesforce can demand dozens of clicks on the ‘Add To Salesforce’ button and attention to linking every email correctly. It works, but reps might not be both consistent or accurate, which is why there are 28 email and calendar sync apps listed in the Salesforce AppExchange. Both Linkpoint360 (for Outlook) and iHance (for most email systems) have hundreds of reviews, you will probably find that the users think they are intuitive. Unless you are running the Enterprise edition, the add-ons will cost less than an upgrade, and you probably find it much easier to link emails to Salesforce Opportunities and to create new contacts, accounts or opportunities right in Outlook. Take time to consider how well the offerings handle sync of the data you need, especially if you have Apex customizations.

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