Using a CRM to organize your business’s email correspondence

In today’s fast paced business environment, email remains critical to your business’s communication and record-keeping. In addition to the 1-to-1 email that you send to and receive from people related to your business, there are many formats of automated or mass email in use by businesses from monthly newsletters, to product updates to order confirmations. As a category of business communication, email remains an effective and critical tool to correspond between you and the people that matter most to your business. Utilizing the email logging feature in a CRM can go a long way to helping you and your staff organize important email communication that powers your business day-to-day.

What is email logging? - Email logging is a way to get emails you send and receive to show up in the contact records of your CRM. A CRM that includes an email logging feature can go a long way to helping optimize the value of email correspondence with your customers.

How does email logging work? - Email logging sends a copy of the text of an email to the CRM and automatically matches the To/From email address with the contact record in the CRM with the same email address. This process leaves a time and date-stamped marker in the CRM under the customer record along with the text of that email. Learn more about how to log emails here.

Business Benefit - All of Your Customer Email Correspondence is Centralized

Currently, the only way for you to see all of the email correspondence your business’s employees send to and receive from customers is to search through each employee’s email account. Another option is to have all employees bcc you on all emails they send to customers. These options are not practical or desirable. By using email logging in a CRM, all of the emails between anyone in your business and a given customer will be logged inside that customer’s record in your CRM. Now if a customer calls in and a member of your team that has never interacted with that customer before fields the call, they can go into the CRM and see recent emails between your business and that customer. Overall, organizing email through use of an email logging feature will centralize important individual customer communication and provide critical context to your ongoing customer relationship efforts.

Managerial Benefit - Opportunity to Check Quality of Email Messages

A managerial benefit of email logging in a CRM is the opportunity to read the emails your employees send to your customers. This gives you the ability to check and make sure your employees are engaging in best practices with email etiquette and representing your company in the way you want them to. Few things are worse when communicating with a customer than sloppy email etiquette.

Conclusion

Over time as your business grows, the emails sent to and received from customers will contain important context to the relationships your efforts have cultivated. The benefits include providing immediate background on the communication between your business and a given customer all the way to managerial oversight of employee interaction with customers. Keeping all of your business’s email correspondence centralized in a CRM through the use of an email logging feature will go a long way to helping your business stay organized. Equally true is that with your business’s emails organized by customer in a CRM, you can focus on the path forward for the business, not racing around searching through different inboxes for the last email correspondence with a customer.

Have additional questions about how email logging can help your business? Contact us here.