Managing Emails

Syncing Email

Email correspondence is often the center of your day-to-day work as a sales person. Because email is so central to tracking deals and customers, AssignCRM takes email integration very seriously. Email management is one of the most significant features of AssignCRM.

Once your email server details are configured, as we'll discuss in the next section, you go to the Sync tab in AssignCRM and click the Scan button. This will scan your inbox and pull in the headers (basic information) for all the email you received or sent since the last time you performed a sync.

As it does this scan, it analyzes each email to see if it recognizes anything about the email - such as who it was from - to determine where it should be filed.

When the scan is complete, all the emails will be displayed in a list. If there are more than 20 emails, then you'll have to click through the page links at the bottom of the list.

Including Emails

This list is just the list of emails from your inbox. To have these items stored in AssignCRM so others can see them, each entry will have to be "included". To include an email you can click the icon at the beginning of the email row:

This will bring up the following form:

In this form you can either select the deal to associate with the specific email or calendar entry, along with the product that interests them and the pipeline stage they should be entered at. Or, if you don't have a deal to select from the list, just type in the name of a new deal to create. It'll then create the deal and associate it with that entry.

It's important to pay attention to the list of emails that appear in that form. If any of those emails are not specific to that deal, then you should remove them by editing the list, using the backspace key. Only the emails in that list will be associated with that deal going forwards.

Once you submit that form and the entry is included, it will be highlighted in green. The deal name that you associated the entry with will be displayed in the Deal column at the end of the row. It'll also automatically include any other emails in the Sync tab that have the same emails.

Once included, you can exclude an entry by clicking the Exclude icon at the beginning of the row. These options are also available from the dropdown menu at the end of the row. You can also exclude many items at once by multi-selecting them (clicking the circle at the end of the row), and clicking "Exclude Bulk" at the bottom of the list.

AssignCRM will also try to automatically include any emails that it recognizes. It will do this based on the email addresses involved in the email. If it matches an email address to one in your contacts under a deal, then it will automatically assign that email to that deal. But, like we said, you can override what it recognizes by either excluding an email or refiling it under a different deal.

Refiling and Filing by Subject

Refiling is an action you can access from the dropdown menu at the end of the row. It works similar to include, but not only lets you assign a new deal to an email, but also associate all emails with the same subject to a deal.

First it looks through all of the emails in your current scan to see which should be refiled based on the subject. But also from then on any emails that are received that have the same subject will automatically be filed under that particular deal.

Another useful feature is the "Follow Up" action, which you can also access from the dropdown list at the end of each row. This lets you signal an email for follow-up, which means once it's filed it will assign the email to you so it'll be highlighted and you'll get reminders until you tend to it. This can be useful if you know you need to answer a specific email. Once you reply, the assignment will be removed. You can also cancel the follow-up from the Activity tab entry itself.

It's important to remember that this list, on the Sync tab, is just a temporary list that lets you include, verify or refile emails before they are filed into the system. To actually file all the emails in their corresponding deals, you should click File & Clear - which you see at the top of the list of emails. This then downloads all the emails that are to be filed (including all attachments) and then files them under the corresponding deal (on the Deals tab) under the Activity sub-tab.

Once it has finished downloading and filing the emails, the Sync tab will be cleared. The next time you click Sync it will pull in only the emails received after the last time you clicked Scan.