Today’s blog post kicks off a series of the Top 5 Forgotten Salesforce Features.
Feature 1 – Email to Salesforce
Connect to Salesforce using any email client
Most people are aware of the Salesforce for Outlook Connector, but what if you don’t use Outlook? Sure there are Apps on the Appexchange that can connect your email client of choice to Salesforce, but why not use native Salesforce functionality?
The Email to Salesforce feature is a great productivity feature that is underutilized. It allows Users to send an email from their preferred mail client, BCC a unique email address, and have that email copied into Salesforce and associated with a Lead or Contact, Account and open Opportunity. It even supports file attachments being copied into Salesforce. For a busy sales team that leverages email in their selling efforts, this is a must have!
How do you get it?
Activation requires a simple ‘checkbox’ check by an Administrator. Go to Setup – Email Administration – Email to Salesforce
From within the Email to Salesforce setup screen, check the Active box. That’s it!
How do you use it?
After the Administrator activates Email to Salesforce, each user will need to adjust their settings and access their personal Email to Salesforce email address.
To adjust settings, user will go to My Settings – Email – My Email to Salesforce
Within the My Email to Salesforce setup screen, users will enter acceptable email addresses. Emails from these addresses are allowed to associate messages with contacts, accounts, opportunities.
Users will also need to determine how they want to associate email messages within Salesforce.
- Users can choose to associate the email with Leads, Contacts and open Opportunities.
- Users must also define how duplicates should be handled. The best practice is to select “The record with the most activity”. This will associate email with the most active record.
- Additionally, users can choose whether or not to save email attachments and whether to be notified of a successful email association. (Note: we recommend turning this off unless you want to be bombarded with email confirmations)
- Finally, you can enter domain extensions to exclude from email association. Typically, you would enter your company domain here. As this will exclude emails from also being associated to other members of your company within Salesforce.
The last step is for the user to copy their (extremely long) personal Email to Salesforce address and create a contact for it within their mail client. Give it an easy name like “SFDC or Salesforce”
That’s it! Now users can simply fire off emails BCC’ing that contact they created, and know that they’ll end up in Salesforce, associated to the correct Lead or Contact.
Stay tuned for Forgotten Feature #2 in our next blog post…….
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