There’s no doubt email is one of the most effective marketing channels for sales teams. According to Litmus, email delivers an impressive return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent. Nevertheless, email tracking within CRM systems like Salesforce presents some notable challenges.
Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report revealed that 90% of marketers use a CRM system to capture and unify data. However, even with a sophisticated CRM like Salesforce, email tracking can be cumbersome and limiting.
The Trouble With Email Tracking
Sales teams should be spending their time building relationships and driving pipeline, but too often, tools, teams, and data are disconnected, making it difficult to track email performance.
Let’s not forget the marketing implications of email tracking: how do we know why one email or campaign performed better than others? How do we track priority leads throughout their lifecycle? And, is there a way to track the data within Salesforce?
Long story short, whether you’ve completely implemented the Salesforce suite of cloud products or not, email tracking in a single platform is challenging. Most email integration tools require client-side add-ons, complex configurations, and cumbersome management, making it difficult to effectively track and report email interactions.
Salesforce Admins have one goal: find and implement the most efficient ways to drive sales. Tracking the effectiveness of those marketing efforts, particularly in email, often becomes an afterthought.
How to Achieve Email Tracking in Salesforce
Salesforce needs add-ons for email tracking, and some are more efficient to implement and use than others. For example, most add-ons need users to leave the Salesforce experience to track their results. The integration should be seamless, so tracking and reporting happen naturally without adding extra steps for teams already time-strapped.
With traditional email tools, you typically need to install a client-side add-on to your email client. This sounds easy, but can be a hassle for IT, admins, and end users to deploy and maintain. The logistics alone can be a challenge. It’s in no one’s best interest to be hounding our sales teammates about installing something on their computer.
There are a couple of options to improve email tracking in Salesforce:
- Einstein Activity Capture (EAC): EAC is a popular tool that helps automate data capture from emails. (Further cost details can be found from Salesforce here.) If your data needs are straightforward, and you don’t need to store records within Salesforce, EAC might be a good solution for your team. The lack of automation for marketing efforts and limited reporting capabilities also limit its usefulness for some users.
- Salesforce Inbox: Salesforce Inbox is another add-on that’s built to improve productivity. It integrates emails with Salesforce, but also requires users to manually log their activities. For already busy teams, logging their activities is both time-consuming and unrealistic to keep up with.
These tools offer varying degrees of integration and reporting but may fall short for organizations with more complex needs.
Einstein Activity Capture doesn’t store a Salesforce record, just a view, leading to data potentially being stored outside the CRM. If not intentional, do you know where your data is stored? Or how to access it? Or build an actionable, measurable strategy around your email activity?
Even with these solutions “baked-in”, the key issue remains: how can we streamline email tracking in Salesforce without burdening end users or sacrificing data accuracy?
Trail Mail Can Help
Trail Mail is a great solution designed to offer true email history tracking within Salesforce, addressing gaps left by other tools. Unlike EAC, Trail Mail stores email interactions directly within Salesforce, even when leads change email addresses or jobs. It also supports tracking for custom objects, making it ideal for highly customized Salesforce environments with unique requirements. Trail Mail also improves the native reporting capabilities of Salesforce, allowing teams to gain better insights into their teams’ email activities.
Our journey began with the frustration of using standard email integration tools. Our aim is not to outdo Salesforce, but to solve a common problem experienced by many of our clients – maximizing the utility of their CRM. Trail Mail is built with the community in mind, offering an easy-to-configure tool that delivers true email history tracking within Salesforce.
By leveraging Trail Mail, sales teams can focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – without worrying about the complexities of email tracking.
Summary
Email tracking can be especially tricky in Salesforce. There are a few options: including Einstein Activity Capture and Salesforce Inbox, but they lack automation and have limited reporting options. Streamlining email tracking can be done well with a lightweight app, Trail Mail.
