Email is a fact of life in business. Studies show that in a single day, one agent can send out an average 126 emails to various leads and contacts . Contact via email with customers and suppliers whether the messages is a basic response, long personalized message, or a targeted marketing email is imperative. Keeping track of all of these email communications can be challenging. Opportunities can be squandered if an email is forgotten. For a small company it is even more important to keep track of each of these communications. Each email fault can have a major impact on revenue. Salesforce helps companies, both small and large, not only become more efficient, it enables them to succeed in battle and win the war on email communication.
Salesforce provides great weapons to help companies on the communication battlefield:
Activity History
The first and most important weapon Salesforce has is Activity History. Each time an email is sent out via Salesforce on a contact, that activity is stored with the date, time, and content that was sent out to the individual. From this Email Activity, the agent can create follow up tasks, set reminders, and even add attachments. This feature gives the agent the visibility and understanding of the customer so mistakes will not be repeated in battle.
https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=activities_open_and_history_cex.htm&language=en_US
Many times agents send out the same email to multiple contacts, and spend a large chunk of their time personalizing each email so as to make a larger impact to the individual. For any company, this is precious battlement time that can be given back to your agents by using Salesforce’s Email Templates and Letterheads. Letterheads give your emails custom branding unique to your company. You can insert a logo, change colors, and even add a footer. Once you have built your letterhead you can attach it to any or all email templates you make going forward. Now, say your agent sends out the same follow up email to each of their contacts; email templates give the agent a way to send this email out with just a few button clicks, without time wasted on personalization. They work by using dynamic fields which Salesforce calls “merged fields”. They represent fields on objects in your Salesforce. As an example, instead of typing in the first name of the contact at the beginning of the email each time, the merged field {!Contact.FirstName} is used. When the Email is associated with a specific contact, it uses these merged fields to pull in their name from the contact object automatically. With Email templates and Letterheads, your agents have more time to fight the good fight of sales and communication with existing customers.
● Salesforce Letterhead Help:
http://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=creating_letterheads.htm
● Salesforce Email Template Help:
https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=creating_html_email_templates.htm&language=en_US
Email to Salesforce Connectors
Many times the communication battle is lost by losing/forgetting emails in the sea of a sales team’s inbox. While Salesforce gives the ability to track emails, there are times when someone might forget to log that they sent out an email or even received a reply. Luckily, Salesforce has also made it easy to hook your email directly to it, to push through the front line. Depending on the email service that you are using there are various options to connect an inbox to Salesforce.
● Salesforce for Outlook
○ This is an installable tool that allows you to sync contacts, events, and tasks between Outlook and Salesforce. It also allows you to add emails directly to a Salesforce contact, while also providing a view into the Salesforce records related to the contact.
■ Implementation Guide:
http://resources.docs.salesforce.com/200/7/en-us/sfdc/pdf/sfo_getting_started_guide.pdf
■ Video: Getting Started with Salesforce for Outlook
http://salesforce.vidyard.com/watch/1FFoihBBaWKGNwtgwFsIeQ
● Cirrus Insight
○ Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, and mobile compatible, this powerful tool is a purchasable app on the AppExchange. It allows you to sync emails and calendar events to Salesforce, schedule emails to send at a later time, book meetings right from your inbox, and have it all sync back up with Salesforce. There are many more features to this tool that can be found on their website:
https://www.cirrusinsight.com/.
● Ebsta
○ Great free to low cost tool for Gmail. This tool essentially adds a top toolbar to your Gmail account that allows you, with a touch of a button, add contacts, emails and events to Salesforce.
■ Company Website:
■ AppExchange app:
https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B4xVrEAJ
Salesforce helps rally the troops and these, tools are the weapons Salesforce arms your team with to win the war on email communication.