Set Up Emails in Salesforce

Email Experience in Salesforce

Salesforce is a robust CRM that brings enhancements to all kinds of sales processes. Of course, this includes email experience.

With features that Salesforce offers, you can give your sales reps the necessary tools to help them better communicate with their clients, boost their productivity and overall - make their lives easier.

Let’s take a look at some basic features for email that you should consider when setting up the Salesforce organization.

Configure Letterheads and Email Templates

One of the best ways for your team to look professional while conducting business is to make sure that their correspondence is properly branded. Salesforce lets you customize your emails by adding a custom letterhead to them, and allows you to create email templates for specific types of communication.

Let’s take a look at how to use those features.

Create an email template in Salesforce

Now that our letterhead is ready, let’s create a custom email template to put it to use. Just like with letterheads, search for Email Templates in the App Launcher. Click New and fill out the fields you need. Remember to change the folder to Public Email Templates. Otherwise, your email template won’t be available for users.

When you are done, it’s time to test it out. Create a test contact, or if you are doing this in the Trailhead Playground, find a contact or a lead that you like and go to the Activity tab. In the email tab click on the “Insert,create, or update template icon” button. Find your email template and confirm you want to insert it.

Simple and easy, yet very useful in everyday communication with clients. Make sure to talk to the sales teams or managers to set up the email templates they need. Remember that templates not only save time, but ensure proper branding.

See the official documentation on Lightning Email Templates.

Organization-Wide Email Addresses

Another type of emails you can set up for your organization are organization-wide emails. They are common email aliases that your company uses (e.g. contact@company.com). When enabled, users can select an organization-wide email address instead of selecting their own emails.

Organization-wide emails are especially useful for no-reply situations and automations. To configure them, go to Organization-Wide Address in Setup. You can define them for each profile.

See the official documentation on Organization-Wide Email Addresses

Use Send Later for Scheduled Emails

Using the activity tab to send emails to clients works great when you want to connect with them right that second. But sometimes your sales reps want to schedule an email to be sent at the most optimal time instead of sending it out immediately. That’s what the Send Later feature is for.

To set up Send Later, go to a lightning record page or homepage and simply drop the “Send Email Later - Pending List” component onto the page. Now, sales reps will be able to use it to schedule email to individual clients or to groups of contacts or leads (with list email which we’re going to cover next).

A couple of things you need to know about Send Later:

• Scheduling only works for single emails. You can’t schedule a reply.
• An email sent with Send Later can’t be sent from an organization-wide email address.
• Remember that recipient addresses are saved when email is scheduled, so even if a contact is deleted from Salesforce, the email still gets sent.
• The actual send time may slightly differ from the scheduled time.

Send List Email

To send bulk email to Leads, Contacts or Campaigns Members in Salesforce Classic we had a feature called “Send Mass Email”. In Lightning, we can use “Send List Email” to do the same thing.

It’s worth noting that each email sent with Send List Email is sent out as an individual email. You might be tempted to use this for marketing campaigns, but it’s recommended to use other tools for that, such as Pardot, Marketing Cloud or 3rd Party solutions available in the AppExchange. They will give you much more insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns, and will include the features that are enforced by law (e.g. a profile center where clients can unsubscribe to mailing lists).

If you aren’t familiar with Marketing Cloud, check out our articles:
Guide to Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud Setup - Definitive Guide
Marketing Cloud Lists and Data Extensions

To enable Send List Email, make sure that users have the “Allow sending of List Emails” permission assigned to them. By doing that, they should be able to select contacts or leads in the related list view section and click the Send List Email action.

Remember that you can manually select up to 200 leads or contacts from a list view. Also, list email count against your org’s daily email send limit. It’s usually 5,000 emails sent per day, so be mindful of that.

See the official documentation on Send List Email

Integrate Outlook and Gmail with Salesforce

Sales reps spend up to 28% of their day sending and reading emails. For many of them it’s their second nature. If your company has just started using Salesforce, they might not be too happy about their new tools for contacting clients. And switching between two different applications is the opposite of productive. That’s why Salesforce lets you integrate your favorite email providers with your Salesforce organization.

When integrated, sales reps can work with Salesforce data directly in Gmail or Outlook or in the Salesforce Inbox mobile app.

The process of integrating Gmail and Outlook is documented in detail here. Or you can try the Trailead module that takes you step by step through the whole integration: Gmail  Outlook

Here’s a list of all features that come with integrating Gmail/Outlook with Salesforce

Conclusion

These features don’t cover everything that’s available to enhance the email experience in Salesforce. But when you are setting up your Salesforce organization, these should be the ones to include on your first to-do list.

If you are looking for more, visit the Salesforce Help to learn about all the other enhancements there are, and don’t forget to follow the latest Salesforce Releases. Each of them brings many new features. You can read our blog to find out what’s coming in the Salesforce Spring’ 21 Release (and yes, there are some updates to the Email Experience as well).