How to Configure & Use Email To Salesforce

Email to Salesforce

Salesforce offers a few ways to marry the emails, contacts and calendar from your email application to Salesforce. This means that you can surface the data from your email application to Salesforce and vice versa. This offers a few benefits like having a more complete picture of the customer inside CRM, information becoming visible to the wider team in your Salesforce Org, less switching between the applications, better productivity,  better collaboration internally and with the customer etc. 

The different options available for this integration are

  1. Email to Salesforce (Free)
  2. Outlook Integration / GMail Integration (Free)
  3. GMail Integration and Sync / Outlook Integration and Sync (Free)
  4. Einstein Activity Capture (Free for upto 100 Users)
  5. Salesforce Inbox (Paid)
  6. 3rd Party Products on AppExchange (Paid)

Each of these options have specific features along with their own pros and cons. In this blog, I have covered the 1st option – how to set up and use Email To Salesforce.

Email To Salesforce is an interesting feature in Salesforce that allows you to keep track of your email communications with the customers in Salesforce. Whatever email application (Outlook, GMail, Yahoo, IBM Lotus Notes or any other) you are using, you can store these emails in Saleforce under Leads, Contacts or Opportunities in Salesforce as an activity.

Once activated, the way this works is a unique “Email To Salesforce” address will be generated for every user in Salesforce. When a user is sending an email, all they need to do is include this unique email address in Bcc line of their email. That’s it!

When Salesforce receives the email it will check the ‘To’ and ‘Cc’ email address(es) with the existing records in Lead and Contact and if found, that email will be stored as an activity under these records. If no match is found, the email will go to ‘My Unresolved Items’. The user then can manually assign those emails to respective records.

So without further delay let’s jump right to the step by step guide. In the next 10-15 minutes, you would be able to set it up on your own and your sales or marketing team will love you for that. 🙂

Here is what we are covering in this short guide:

  • Activate Email To Salesforce
  • Set Up Email To Salesforce
  • Test Email To Salesforce

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References & Useful URLs

  1. Help Article – Relate Emails to Records Using Other Email Applications – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=email_my_email_2_sfdc_landing_page.htm&type=5

7 thoughts on “How to Configure & Use Email To Salesforce”

  1. Email to Salesforce is an interesting feature. So I have an email alert that sends an HTML email and the ask is to store the email on a number of different Contact records in Activity History. I added the Email To Salesforce address as one of the Email Alert recipients. Out it went and lo, the emails got stored in the respective Contacts. All was well until someone else triggered the Email Alert to fire and using their email as the sender and my Email to Salesforce address – big problems.

    I know you can add a list of addresses as valid sender addresses when you are looking at the Email to Salesforce settings but how to enter a huge number of addresses – it doesn’t scale well at all.

    1. Hi Dean, though it is a bit late to reply but I think this email to Salesforce feature is more for individual Salesforce users to be able to forward their emails to Salesforce so that it gets stored as an activity.

      If you need to allow a large number of users to send emails to Salesforce, you can look at “email to case” feature ( https://www.asagarwal.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-setting-up-email-to-case-in-salesforce/ ) or Apex Email Service ( https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.meta/apexcode/apex_classes_email_inbound_what_is.htm )

      Regards,
      Ashish

  2. Nice article… so we understand that outbound emails from an organisation to external leads gets logged in Salesforce when the email to Salesforce email is used in bcc.

    However what happens if the external lead reaponds to thia email sent above. How does this get logged and tracked in Salesforce?

    1. Thanks Ash,

      There are a few options to get that in Salesforce.

      1. You can bcc the email received from lead to Salesorce following the guide in this blog post.
      2. you can use Salesforce Outlook Integration to save a copy of that email in Salesforce.
      3. You can activate a feature called “Einstein Activity Catpure” that will automatically show all the emails in Salesforce.

      Option 1 & 2 will need to be done manually by the users, where as option 3 is automatic. Option 3 will be my preferred option.

      Hope this helps.

      Thanks,
      Ashish

      1. Thanks a lot Ashish! That was helpful.

        However even if we have Einstein Activity Capture enabled , is it possible to get some kind of notification on the salesforce dashboard whenever a prospect responds by email to a sales rep’s email?

        1. You’re welcome Ash. No, currently it is not possible to get notification when a prospect responds to an email. All Einstein Activity Capture will do is surface that email inside Salesforce. But you can’t build any automation rules on that.

  3. Would it be possible to set this up just for a few users?
    I have 450 + users in our org and just a small department 10 users want to use this functionality. I don’t want to spam all other 440 users with this confirmation mail.

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