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Send Email Through Salesforce

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Let your users send email from Gmail and Office 365 through Salesforce.
  • Customize how Salesforce displays email.
  • Use Enhanced Email to tailor email to meet your reps’ needs.

Send Email from External Services Through Salesforce

The sales folks at Ursa Major Solar rely heavily on communicating with leads and contacts using Gmail, which they recently switched to. Throughout the day, these sales reps use Salesforce to work their leads and handle their sales business. But they also work in Gmail to keep up on direct communications with their leads and contacts.

Reduce Context Switching

The sales manager, Lincoln, hears that toggling between Salesforce and Gmail isn’t efficient for his reps, and it requires an unreasonable amount of context switching. Maria looks into whether Salesforce offers something to ease the pain.

Turns out that Maria can flip a switch that lets her sales folks connect their Gmail accounts to Salesforce. Here’s how.

  1. From Setup, enter External Email in the Quick Find box, then select Send through External Email Services.
    Settings for Send Through External Email Services
  2. Turn on one of the email services your company uses.

How Sales Reps Start Sending Email Through Salesforce

Maria’s sales reps can now connect their Gmail accounts to Salesforce. But her reps need the standard user profile or the “Send Email through External Email Services” user permission. With either one, the next time her reps compose an email in Salesforce, a prompt appears. Then, her reps can start the setup process for connecting their email account to Salesforce.

Prompt to connect external email account to Salesforce

When Maria’s reps choose to connect Gmail, they follow a couple of simple prompts.

Prompt to allow Salesforce to connect to external email

Her sales reps can manage their email configuration from My Email Settings within their personal settings.My Email Settings

The My Email Settings page gives Maria’s reps the option to send email through their external account. The option also lets them customize the name and signature that appears on outgoing emails.

If sending email from Gmail or Office 365 through Salesforce can work for your sales teams, keep these things in mind.

  • Gmail and Office 365 handle deliverability and compliance.
  • The emails your reps send through Salesforce come from their Gmail or Office 365 email addresses.
  • Emails sent through workflows and triggers are still sent through Salesforce.
  • Bounce management isn’t supported when you send through external email accounts.
  • If your reps send email through Gmail or Office 365, Transport Layer Security (TLS) is handled through the external email service and not through Salesforce settings.
  • Email delivery information for Send through Gmail or Office 365 isn't available in the email logs. Obtain email logs from Gmail or Office 365 instead.

Improve Your Reps’ Email Experience in Salesforce

To keep with the theme of reducing context switching for her sales reps, Maria wants to further encourage them to send email from Gmail through Salesforce. That way, her reps can stay focused on their leads and deals without toggling to a different application. Enhanced Email in Salesforce can help Maria do that.

Tailor Email to Support Your Company’s Needs

Maria can better support her reps by setting up email features and options that work best for Ursa Major. For example, Maria can:

  • Add custom fields to emails
  • Set up triggers based on emails
  • Use the Salesforce API to manage emails
  • Customize page layouts for email messages
  • Let her reps relate emails to other Salesforce records

Get access to more details about these features in the Resources section.

Tips for Enhanced Email

It comes enabled out of the box, unless you set up your company to use Email-to-Case. And if your company does use Email-to-Case, your reps can already use custom fields, workflows, and triggers with emails without enabling Enhanced Email.

  • With Enhanced Email, emails sent from Salesforce are saved as both EmailMessage records and task records. But only the EmailMessage record appears on the email detail page.
  • For emails added from Web-to-Lead, Salesforce for Outlook, and Lightning for Outlook, Salesforce stores the emails as task records, even if you have Enhanced Email enabled.
  • Custom currency fields aren’t supported with the EmailMessage object.
  • EmailMessage records can have one record type.
  • Workflow rules can use EmailMessage records to only update fields on Case records.

Now that Maria’s aware of these details, too, she’s eager to help her reps have a better email experience in Salesforce.

Resources

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