Email in Zoho CRM: An Overview

A sales professional's primary tool is the CRM; yet most of his communication with customers happens via email. He is required to constantly switch between CRM and his email inbox to follow up with prospects and update sales tasks accordingly. 

The primary problem with having CRM and a communication channel independent of each other is the lack of sales context. Following are the top three benefits of activating email in Zoho CRM.

1. Contextual view of email conversations with a customer: 
   A record of your email interactions with a particular lead or contact as well as associated sales details can be tracked at a single location in CRM. Simply visit a contact's detail page and scroll down to the Email related list. This will display all your email conversations with this particular customer - along with associated sales details. The next time you reach out to this customer, you will be well-informed of their sales details and past conversations, and hence your conversations are bound to be more effective. 
2. Prioritizion of customer interactions based on the sales context: 
   As CRM contains all the required sales details, your incoming email gets automatically organized into columns according to how you've set up your CRM, such as  Contacts and Leads and Colleagues. This way, customer conversations are already sorted for you based on their order of priority, so you don't miss any important ones. Even if a person is not available in CRM, they get organized under a separate column called Not in CRM for the sake of easy identification.
   This facility is powered by Zoho SalesInbox, an exclusive email inbox designed for sales people. You can avail this facility on integrating your email account with Zoho CRM.
3. No need to switch between email and CRM:
   As you check emails from a contact, you may need to update the contact's associated sales details. You don't have to switch between tabs to do this anymore. You can reply to an email and add follow up with sales details from the SAME WINDOW, i.e, the email detail page in CRM. 

Types of emailing options in Zoho CRM

Email features in Zoho CRM can be looked at, in two levels:

Native emailing features:

Let's say you wish to send an email to a lead, but you don't have your email address configured in CRM. In such a case, can you send an email from CRM?

The answer is YES, you can. 

Owing to the importance of email communication in sales, Zoho CRM comes with a set of native emailing features, which are available whether you configure your email account in CRM or not. In the case of our example, the email will be sent from CRM to the lead, and in the From address, the lead will see the email ID you used to register with CRM. So Zoho CRM facilitates some basic emailing needs by default. 

These native emailing features include sending individual emails as well as mass emails, BCC Dropbox, Email Insights, Organization emails and contextual view of emails SENT.  

Email integration-specific features: 

When you send emails from CRM using the native features, you will see a copy of all the SENT emails in CRM, contextually. But what about responses from customers? In order to view emails that are SENT as well as RECEIVED inside your inbox, you need to configure your email inbox in CRM. 

Once you activate your email account in CRM, you can completely avoid switching between tabs. You can work on emails and sales from one window. In addition to native features, you will receive the benefit of contextual emails as well as SalesInbox, an email inbox designed exclusively for sales people. 

Let's look at the native features as well as integration-specific features in further detail below. 

Split-up of email features in Zoho CRM

Name of the feature	Available natively in CRM	Available upon activating your email account in CRM
Emails received FROM customer	✘	✓
Zoho SalesInbox	✘	✓
Send emails individually	✓	✓
Send mass emails	✓	✓
BCC Dropbox	✓	✓
Email insights	✓	✓
Organziation emails	✓	✓

NATIVE EMAILING FEATURES 

1) Individual emails:
You can send an email to a lead or contact in CRM individually using the SEND EMAIL option in the record's Detail page. You can either send an existing email template or compose one from scratch. This email will be listed under the Email Related List of the lead/contact. However, note that the emails SENT to the lead/contact will be displayed contextually, and not the ones received from customers, as CRM does not have a hold on your INBOX yet. 

2) Mass Emails:
You can send an email to a large number of your leads and contacts in one shot using Zoho CRM's mass email feature. Mass emails can be sent in two ways:

1. Customers filtered based on criteria - You can send emails to customers who are pre-filtered in the form of custom list views. For example, "My contacts", "Tradeshow leads" and so on.
   Or you can enter new criteria at the time of sending the email. For example, Lead Status is Not Contacted. The selected email template will be sent to all leads/contacts this filtered.
2. Customers selected manually - The second option is to manually select the leads/contacts you wish to send an email to. Simply select all required contacts and associate the required email template and SEND EMAIL. 

3) BCC Dropbox:
BCC Dropbox is a simple way to unify emails associated to multiple email accounts in one place - the CRM. For example, a business may use several email addresses to converse with a customer at various points in time- say, contact@zylker.com; support@zylker.com; info@zylker.com and so on. 

These emails may have different contexts and will reside separately, in the Sent Emails section of these different email accounts. But what if you need to link all these emails to the customer in a single place, for better context?

Enter BCC Dropbox. This provides a way for you to pull up all emails you've sent to a customer, even though the email IDs you used to do so were different. 

How does this work?
First add a list of verified email addresses you wish to link in CRM under the BCC Dropbox section. Example, contact@zylker.com and info@zylker.com.

A unique email address will be generated for you. All you have to do is, whenever you send an email to a customer, make sure you paste this unique address in the BCC section. 

Now a copy of the email you send from any of the verified email addresses will be associated to the specific lead/contact in Zoho CRM in their Email Related List. 

This way, you can link emails sent to a lead or contact from different address in a single place. Note that the recipient must be added in Zoho CRM as a lead or contact for this to be effective. 

4) Organization Emails 
Email integration in CRM is generally account-specific. Meaning, each user in a Zoho CRM account must configure his/her email account in CRM. However, there may be cases in which all users need to send emails from a common company-based email account: example, support@zylker.com. This is referred to as an organization email address and this has to be configured by the Administrator. 

Once this organization ID is set up and verified, users can choose to send from their own email addresses or this organization address. 

5) Email Insights
It's important not only to have multiple emailing options but also to measure the effectiveness of your email communication. Zoho CRM comes with an Email Insights suite to this effect. Email Insights help you understand the performance of the emails that you send to your customers, which will further help you plan your future emails. You will get the status of your email whether it was,

• Delivered
• Opened
• Bounced

As part of the Email Insights suite, you will also receive template analytics and statistics to understand which template was a hit with customers - meaning which template performed better when compared with others - so that you can use the most effective one for your future emailing needs. 

EMAIL INTEGRATION-SPECIFIC FEATURES

In addition to the native email features discussed above, you will enjoy the following benefits upon activating your email account in CRM.  

1) Contextual Emails 
Once you have activated your email account, CRM will begin to sync emails you send AND RECEIVE using your account. And so, you will start seeing emails sent FROM and TO your inbox inside CRM.

2) Zoho SalesInbox
Once you have activated your email account in CRM, your a copy of your complete inbox including filters and labels will be synced with CRM. This is called Zoho SalesInbox, an exclusive inbox designed for sales people by Zoho. SalesInbox comes with loads of benefits for users, starting with the CRM view for prioritization and sales-context based email view as seen earlier. In addition to these features, SalesInbox offers the following important benefits as well.

• ResponseWatch: A very important part of sales is active follow-up. You might miss out on valuable opportunities by just failing to follow-up and that's just unacceptable. Enter ResponseWatch, which lets you set an alert for yourself if you don't hear from a customer within a specified time frame, say one day. 
  This way you can stay on top of customers who don't reply to you. Make active follow-ups with the help of ResponseWatch. 
   
• Sales + Email filters: Many email clients offer you a facility to set up filters so that you prioritize emails; so how are filters in SalesInbox different? Well, these filters come with email as well as sales criteria. 
  Regular email filters let you filter emails based on TO/CC, Subject, Content and so on, which are email parameters.
  In addition to email based criteria, SalesInbox filters let you filter emails based on associated sales criteria. For instance, you can say, filter emails sent TO me, by leads whose source is Tradeshow. SalesInbox filters offer you the best of both worlds - sales as well as email. 
  SalesInbox also helps you apply labels to emails. A label is used represented with colours to easily identify emails belonging to specific category. 
   
• Automate the addition of email senders as leads/contacts:
  You can get CRM to automatically add the sender of an email as a lead or contact in CRM based on specific criteria. 

Setting up Email in Zoho CRM

You can set up an email account from the popular email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo etc via IMAP configuration. 

• IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is useful when you wish your entire email inbox to be replicated inside Zoho CRM. IMAP configuration is also a preferred protocol by many businesses as it facilitates synchronization across multiple devices. When you activate IMAP account in CRM, you will automatically stand to gain SalesInbox benefits.
• POP (Post Office Protocol) - This protocol does not allow multiple device-synchronization. However, this is useful if you want to ensure that the folders created on one device are not replicated on the other devices. 

According to your usage and preferences, you can choose a protocol that suits your business needs.