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.
- 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. - 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. - 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.
Without a well organized, email communication in place it could be difficult to connect with your prospects and customers. Zoho CRM provides various options to work with your email client and also associate the emails to the customers and prospects within Zoho CRM. The email options that Zoho CRM provides are:
Built-in Email functionality
Without any email account configured, you can send email to your contacts from within your CRM account and also have them associated to the contacts or leads.
Zoho Mail Integration
Enable the Zoho Mail Integration and set up your email account within Zoho CRM. A copy of all the outgoing as well as the incoming emails are associated to the corresponding CRM records. You can set up an email account from the popular email clients or use POP3 or IMAP protocols to create custom email accounts. With this integration, you also get the option to share emails with other users in your organization's CRM account. See Also Zoho Mail Add-on
Using two protocols, you can set up the business email account within Zoho CRM.
- IMAP - It lets you work with emails without downloading them to the computer first. IMAP allows storing of emails on remote servers. This two-way protocol also allows synchronization of emails among multiple devices.
- POP3 - POP downloads email to your computer and usually deletes the email from the remote server. This protocol does not allows the synchronization of emails among multiple devices. If you have more than one device where you read your mail, you could see read emails as unread with no indication of which you deleted, read or flagged. The folders you created on one device won't be replicated on the other devices.
MailMagnet
This option is enabled for users who have enabled Zoho Mail Integration. It provides instant notifications when you receive those important customer emails in your inbox that need immediate attention. It intelligently scans your inbox and notifies you of the emails from your prospects and customers in CRM. See Also MailMagent
Zoho CRM Plug-in for MS Outlook
If you send and receive emails to Microsoft Outlook, you can have them associated to your Zoho CRM account using the Zoho CRM Plug-in in your Microsoft Outlook account. See Also Plug-in for MS Outlook
BCC Dropbox
When you have multiple mailboxes with different email addresses, all used for business communication, emails sent from different email addresses can still be stored and associated to the contacts in Zoho CRM. BCC Dropbox provides a unique email address for each user in your Zoho CRM that can be used to BCC emails you send to customers. This unique email address automatically pull in all the emails sent to your leads and contacts in Zoho CRM. See Also BCC Dropbox