Chapter 8
In This Chapter
Getting to know Salesforce e-mail fields
Setting e-mail options
Sending an e-mail
Delivering mass e-mails
Keeping an eye on e-mails after you send them
E-mail is a fundamental method for communicating with customers, prospects, and friends. By using e-mail correctly, you can manage more sales territory and be responsive to customers. However, by not using e-mail appropriately, you can leave a bad impression or lose a client.
If e-mail is an indispensable part of your business, you and other users can send e-mail from Salesforce and track the communication history from relevant records, such as accounts, contacts, opportunities, and cases. This capability is helpful if you inherit a major customer account because you can potentially view all the e-mail interactions from a single account record.
Sending an e-mail is a cinch, and if that were all this chapter covered, we’d have summarized it in just one section. But Salesforce provides additional e-mail tools to help you better sell to, service, and wow your customers. In this chapter, we show you all the tricks and best practices for sending a basic e-mail, mass e-mailing, using templates, and tracking responses.
An e-mail in Salesforce is an activity record comprising fields for the message and for the people you want to keep in the loop on the message.
The e-mail record comes with standard fields that people commonly use when sending e-mail. Most fields are self-explanatory, but the following list summarizes some additional fields:
Before you begin e-mailing people from Salesforce, check out a couple of setup options that can save you time and headaches. In the following sections, we show you how to personalize your outbound e-mail as well as how to build personal e-mail templates for common messages that you send to people.
When you send an e-mail via Salesforce, the recipient can receive the message just as if you sent the e-mail from your standard e-mail program. The e-mail message appears as if it came from your business e-mail address, and you can use a standard signature to go with your message. And if the recipient replies to your e-mail, that reply e-mail comes right to your standard e-mail inbox. To pull this off, though, you need to personalize your e-mail settings in Salesforce.
To set up your e-mail, follow these steps:
The My Email Settings page appears in Edit mode.
That way, you can still keep e-mails in customer folders in your e-mail application.
If you’re personalizing your e-mail settings for the first time, you might notice a default signature from Salesforce. This message appears at the bottom of your e-mail in lieu of your signature. Unless you’re using Personal Edition, go ahead and change it.
The Email page under Personal Setup appears, and your settings are modified.
If you ask your top sales reps about sending e-mail, they’ll probably tell you that they don’t re-create the wheel every time they send certain messages to customers. It’s a waste of their time, and time is money. Instead, they use templates and form letters to send the same message with less work.
In your standard sales process, you probably send a variety of e-mails to customers, including
Although you do need to personalize a message to fit the specific details of a customer, you probably use certain effective phrases and sentences over and over again. Instead of searching for a prior message and cutting and pasting, you can create personal e-mail templates and improve your productivity.
To create a personal template, follow these steps:
An Email Templates page appears.
Step 1 of the template wizard appears.
The next page of the wizard appears, and the content of the page depends on the choice you made. Using HTML is most common and has certain advantages, both from appearance and tracking standpoints, but older e-mail programs cannot receive HTML e-mail.
You can use the template only after you select the Available for Use check box.
After clicking Save, a Text Email Template page for your new template appears in Saved mode with an Attachments related list.
If you choose to build your e-mail template with a letterhead, you have to select a previously created letterhead and then a layout by using the drop-down lists provided. After you click the Save & Next button, the Step 3 page of the wizard appears.
You can create HTML or Custom e-mail templates only if you have the Edit HTML Templates permission. See an admin if you don’t have the right permissions.
The Step 4 page of the wizard appears.
For those customers who can’t or don’t want to receive HTML e-mails, they can receive the text version. If the message is similar or identical to the HTML version, click the Copy Text from HTML Version button and modify the content, as needed.
An HTML or Custom Email Template page for your new template appears in Saved mode with an Attachments related list, which you can use for attaching standard documents.
We show you how to use your e-mail template in the later section “Using e-mail templates.”
If you are a system administrator, you can create and save custom branded letterheads to ensure that all your templates have a similar look and feel.
To create a letterhead, follow these steps:
If this is your first time visiting, an Understanding Letterheads page appears. You can bypass it by clicking the Next button.
The Letterhead Properties section of the New Letterhead wizard appears.
If you don’t want to let anyone use the letterhead just yet, you can leave the Available For Use check box deselected for now.
The Letterhead Details section of the New Letterhead Wizard appears (see Figure 8-2). This is where you can graphically design your letterhead.
The Background Color window opens with the default color as gray. You can set it to any HTML color code or use the Paint Can button to select from a color chart. When you’re done, click the OK button to close the window.
The Attach File window opens to let you select from any image that has already been uploaded to the Documents tab in Salesforce. When you find the file you want, click its name to select it and close the window.
The Header Properties window opens. You can specify the background color, the horizontal and vertical alignment, and the height of the Header section to ensure that your logo looks great. When you’re done, click the OK button to close the window.
The Top Color and Height window opens. If you don’t want a top line, you can set the line color to the same as your background and set the height to 0. When you’re done, click the OK button to close the window.
You can configure the middle and bottom lines, the footer properties and logo, and the body background color, just like you did in the previous steps.
A preview of your new letterhead is shown. You can always make additional changes by clicking the Edit Letterhead button.
Salesforce allows you to send e-mails to leads and contacts; however, the management of the conversations (that is, the back and forth of e-mail dialog that occurs) happens in your company’s e-mail management system of choice.
Many companies today are moving their e-mail systems online to reduce the costs of using and maintaining traditional e-mail software systems like Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Don’t get us wrong; Outlook is the big gorilla of the e-mail (officially called “productivity tools”) space. At the same time, using web-based e-mail systems like Google Apps or Office 365 has gained a lot of momentum.
If you’re using a web-based e-mail system, you can still save and track your outbound e-mails to Salesforce, too, which allows you to connect an e-mail to a record.
To first activate the Email to Salesforce feature, have your administrator choose Setup⇒Administer⇒Email Administration⇒Email to Salesforce. Click the Edit button in the middle of the Email to Salesforce page to select the Active check box and enable Email to Salesforce.
After you make your check box selections and click the Save button in the middle of the page, a pop-up box appears that optionally allows the admin to notify all Salesforce users about the Email to Salesforce feature.
After your administrator activates Email to Salesforce, choose My Settings⇒Email⇒My Email to Salesforce to get to the My Email to Salesforce page. In the middle of the page, a highlighted field notes your Email to Salesforce address. Whenever you’re writing an e-mail in your online e-mail system (we use Gmail as the example), paste that address into the BCC field of your e-mail. When you send your e-mail, it’s logged as a completed task in Salesforce, under whichever lead or contact record whose e-mail address matches that in the To field.
If you send and receive e-mail from multiple addresses (and possibly from the same inbox), you can list all your e-mail addresses so that Salesforce can associate correspondence from those e-mail addresses to the automatically generated Email to Salesforce address. To edit your e-mail addresses, follow these steps:
After you set your Email to Salesforce special e-mail address, it’s time to use it.
Keeping your web browser open to Salesforce and the My Email to Salesforce page, open a new browser window to access your online e-mail system and compose an e-mail (again, we use Google Gmail as example) to a person whose e-mail you know is in Salesforce, associated with a lead or contact. (Make sure that your relationship with this person allows you to send test e-mails to him or her, or you might have some explaining to do!) Simply copy the special e-mail address and paste it into the BCC field. When you’re done writing the body of the e-mail, send it, and voilà! Almost instantaneously, it appears as an activity associated with that lead or contact.
You can send an e-mail to any lead or contact stored in Salesforce with a valid e-mail address. By sending from Salesforce, you can ensure that you and your team members can keep track of critical outbound communications to customers and prospects.
You can initiate your outbound e-mail from many different records in Salesforce, including opportunity, account, case, campaign, lead, and contact records. To create and send an e-mail, go to the relevant record and follow these steps:
A Send an Email page appears, as shown in Figure 8-3. The Email format is in Text, with a Switch to Format link appearing to the right of it. Alternatively, click the Send an Email button in the HTML Email Status related list to default to HTML format. Either way, if you change your mind, you can always switch formats on the Send an Email edit page.
If you have organization-wide e-mail addresses set up in Salesforce, you can select one as your From address. If not, your standard e-mail address will default as the From address.
If you decide to send your e-mail with HTML, you get an added bonus of being able to track your e-mail. See the later section “Tracking HTML e-mails.”
A pop-up window appears, containing a search tool and a list of search results.
If you send an e-mail from the relevant lead or contact record, you can eliminate this step because the To field is prefilled. But, remember to use the Related To field to associate the e-mail to other records, such as an opportunity.
When you select the recipient, the pop-up window disappears, and the To field is populated with your selection.
Depending on which record you started from, the Related To drop-down list might already be filled.
These folks get their e-mail on the To list when they receive and open your message. They don’t have to be contacts or leads.
A pop-up window appears, containing a drop-down list for coworkers at your company and for contacts of the account.
The pop-up window disappears, and the CC and BCC fields reflect your selections.
Salesforce allows you to send e-mails to people who aren’t contacts, leads, or users. Just type the e-mail address directly into this field.
If you want to use an e-mail template, stop here and go to the next section.
If your contact or lead in the To field doesn’t yet have an e-mail address, this absence is flagged before you send the e-mail. A Click Here to Edit the Email Address link appears that you can click to associate an e-mail with the record without having to leave your Send an Email page.
The record that you started from reappears, and a link to a copy of your e-mail appears in the Activity History related lists of the records that you linked.
In the section “Building personal e-mail templates,” earlier in this chapter, we show you how to create a personalized template. In this section, you find out how to send an e-mail that uses a template you created. First, create an e-mail (as described in the preceding section), and then follow these additional steps before you send it:
A pop-up window appears, displaying a list of available templates.
The pop-up window refreshes, displaying a list of available templates based on your folder selection, as shown in Figure 8-4.
The pop-up window disappears, and the page reappears with content based on the template that you selected.
The record you started from reappears, and a link to a copy of your e-mail appears under the Activity History related lists of the linked records.
If you struggle to stay in touch with prospects or customers on a regular basis, you can use Salesforce to send mass e-mails and shorten your workload. Mass e-mail is particularly helpful for sales reps who send common messages that don’t require high levels of personalization. For example, if you’re an institutional sales rep selling shares of a hedge fund, you might want to send a monthly e-mail newsletter to sophisticated investors specifically interested in your fund.
You can send a mass e-mail to contacts or leads — the method is similar.
To send out a mass e-mail, go to the Contacts home page or Leads home page, and follow these simple steps:
The Recipient Selection page appears.
If you find the recipients you want, skip to Step 5.
The Create New View page appears. In most circumstances, you need to create a custom view.
For example, if you want to send an e-mail to all customer contacts located in New York, you can build a view. (See Chapter 4 for general details on how to create custom views.) When you click Save, the Recipient Selection page reappears, displaying a list of contacts that meet your criteria.
Any of your leads or contacts that have the Email Opt Out check box selected are automatically omitted from these lists.
Contacts or leads that don’t have e-mail addresses lack an available check box in the Action column.
A Template Selection page appears, where you can select an e-mail template from the e-mail template folders and associated lists.
You can skip this step if you already see the desired e-mail template on the list results.
A Preview Template appears.
A Confirmation page appears, summarizing the number of contacts that will receive the mass e-mail.
A Complete page appears, confirming the delivery of your mass e-mail.
By sending and storing important business-related e-mails in Salesforce, you and your teams can get a more complete picture of what’s happening with your accounts, contacts, and so on. In the following sections, we show you the basic ways to view your e-mail records and a special feature in Salesforce that allows you to track HTML e-mails.
When you send an e-mail from Salesforce, a copy of your message is logged as a task record on the Activity History related list of related records. For example, if you send an e-mail from an opportunity record in Salesforce, you can view that e-mail from the related Opportunity, Contact, and Account detail pages. See Figure 8-5 for an example.
On an Activity History related list, you can also click the View All button if you want to see the completed activities (including e-mail) on a single page.
If you often wonder whether customers pay attention to e-mails that you send them, you can use the HTML Email Status related list for confirmation that the e-mail was opened. Sales reps can use this feature to see whether contacts and leads are opening and viewing important e-mails on quotes, proposals, and so on.
The HTML Email Status related list (see Figure 8-6) shows data on a number of key elements, including the dates the e-mail was sent, first opened, and last opened, as well as the total number of times it was opened. Although this information isn’t a sure-fire way to determine whether your customer wants to buy, some reps use this feature to measure interest on a single e-mail or even mass e-mails.