How to Manage Your Customers Without Leaving Your Inbox

If you’re a Gmail user, either in your personal life or at work, you’re likely already a convert to the beauty of seamless app integrations. The ability to add a meeting to your calendar or reply to a comment in a shared document directly from your email inbox not only saves you time but also stops things from falling through the cracks. 

No more getting distracted in the middle of your workflow, switching from one app or browser tab to the other, and forgetting what it was you wanted to update. No more static documents flying back and forth from person to person, attempting to keep them organized by adding ‘V#’ to the end of each new version’s name.

Once you start looking for integrations, you’ll realize they’re everywhere, making your life easier, improving your email productivity, and freeing up more of your brain for complex tasks. So why aren’t you using an integrated CRM to access your customer information within your email account?

Integrating Your CRM Leads to More Effective Email Management 

Seamless brand interactions are a crucial part of delivering exceptional customer experiences. Integrating your email client and your CRM is one of the best ways to ensure that any engagement a customer has with your brand carries on, no matter which customer support employee they’re speaking with. 

By linking all communications to the associated customer in your CRM, you ensure that anyone who talks to that person has all the information they need to get up to speed quickly, sparing the customer from annoying repetition while making it less time-consuming to solve an issue.

And this works for non-customer communications, too. How many times have you had to forward an old message from a thread to remind the person you’re communicating with about something the two of you already discussed? Now, in addition to grouping the thread in your email, you can tag different messages to various profiles in your CRM—the person you’re conversing with, the customer you’re talking about, an external vendor, and/or anyone else who’s relevant.

This makes it easier to find and follow up on specific emails quickly, as well as ensuring that all team members have access to the most important emails, even if they weren’t part of the thread. 

Accessing Your CRM from Your Email Inbox Makes Sense 

Given how long we all spend reading emails—28% of our workday, according to McKinsey—and how hard we all thirst for inbox zero, it stands to reason that any tool that makes email more efficient and multifunctional will greatly improve our work lives.

Imagine if you could take that email from your manager laying out all the tasks you need to accomplish this week and parse all those to-dos into a task list straight from the message window or automate the sorting of incoming emails according to the sender’s segmentation in your CRM.

Then add shared email templates to make replies quicker and keep on top of campaign messaging, customized email notifications that align with your CRM priorities, and the ability to create and edit workflows without ever leaving your inbox, and the outlook gets even better.

The more you can do from one place, the more efficient your workday will be, and the less likely you are to introduce errors and lose track of important information. And the beauty of a plugin is that you don’t even have to learn another new system—it just layers functionality on top of the system you’re already accustomed to using, saving you a lot of time in the process.

How Integrated Tools Enable Marketers and Salespeople to Work Smarter

To better explain how these CRM integrations work, let’s dive into a couple of specific examples. 

Let’s say your sales team has recently added the BenchmarkONE integration for your email app. Now, when you get a new email from a client telling you about a friend of theirs who might need your services, instead of jumping over to your CRM to add the lead’s info, you can create a new contact right from the message.

Let’s say you and this client then go back and forth a bit, discussing his friend. All along the way, you can tag the messages to both the client and the lead’s CRM profiles, and you can also add any new information that comes up directly into the lead’s new profile.

When you’re ready to reach out, you can send an introductory email, track whether the recipient opens it, and make a workflow for yourself with next steps to make sure you follow up.

If you have the Contacts+ integration for Gmail, you can see all of the most relevant information about a contact just by hovering over their email address in your inbox—the plugin even includes an automation that pulls relevant public data about the contact’s company into their profile for you. 

Whether you use a CRM for marketing, customer service, sales, or just general customer relationship management, an email integration can drastically improve your workflow.

Why not give it a try? We’d be willing to bet that in a short period of time, you’ll be as reliant on your CRM integration as you are on all the other seamless tech integrations that make your life so much easier.