The primary function of an email is to facilitate the exchange of messages with business stakeholders, enabling seamless communication.
Let's explore how these emails are sent and received within your CRM. One crucial benefit of sending and receiving emails directly through your CRM is that you gain a holistic view of the sales and marketing context related to your emails, including the concerned stakeholders.
Let's take a look at how many ways one can send and receive emails in Zoho CRM.
Sending Email
There are two ways in which a user can send email from within their CRM account:
When no email inbox is integrated to your CRM account (Native email ) : This feature allows businesses to send emails to their customers directly from within the CRM, even if they haven't integrated their email inbox. This means they can use the same email address they have used to sign up for CRM (To ensure their own domain is used for sending emails from CRM, users must authenticate their email address through Email Authentication). You can send emails, create mass emails, and also set up automated emails using workflow rules. However, this is a limited setup that cannot track replies to emails sent via CRM.
When email inbox is integrated to your CRM account via POP3 Or IMAP protocol : Your email inbox (Outlook, Google Workspace, Yahoo, Office 365, etc) becomes a natural extension of Zoho CRM, as it effortlessly integrates using IMAP and POP3 protocols, providing real-time access to your two-way email communications. Once your mailbox is integrated, you can access email conversations (both ways, sent and received) tied to CRM records like contacts, leads, deals, and so on, directly in CRM modules.
Let's explore the different methods through which emails can be sent using CRM in more detail:
Through modules and custom modules
Go to the preferred module and select the record to which you want to send an email.
Click the Send Email button. Alternatively, you can go to the Emails related list and click the Compose Email button.
On the New Message Page:
Your default 'From' email address will be the email you used to sign up for your Zoho CRM account.
If you have configured your organization's email in CRM, you will have an option to choose it from the drop-down.
If you have integrated your email inbox (POP3/IMAP), the 'From' address will correspond to the email address you've integrated with CRM.
Note: By default, the 'From' address will be the email address you integrated into your CRM. If you wish to use a different email address or the default email address you used to create your CRM account, you can enable it by navigating to Setup > Email > Email Configuration > More From Addresses.
Click CC and BCC and specify the appropriate email addresses, if required.
Emails can be sent to the secondary email address and custom email field addresses, if they are specified in the record.
Learn more about POP3 emails tab (existing and old users) here.
Schedule Emails
This feature is available only for Enterprise edition and above.
Suppose many of your customers reside in different time zones or you have an important meeting later in the day, rendering you unavailable to handle emails at a specific time. In such cases, you can easily schedule emails within CRM, allowing the system to handle the email deliveries at the appropriate times. This feature is exclusively available in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Zoho CRM offers three types of scheduling options:
Best time to email, as suggested by Zia email intelligence.
Pre-defined scheduling options (Today or Tomorrow).
Custom scheduling.
To schedule an email
Navigate to the required module within your CRM account. Email scheduling is accessible for Leads, Contacts, and other custom modules.
Choose the record, then click Send Email.
In the Email Compose window, click the Schedule Email icon. If CRM suggests the 'Best time to email this contact,' this time will be displayed. You can then choose this time and schedule the email immediately.
In the Schedule At popup, you can select the time from the following options:
Best time to email - This is a recommendation provided by Zia, CRM's intelligent assistant. CRM analyzes email patterns with customers to suggest the optimal time when the customer is most likely to check their email. You can select one of the provided timestamps to ensure that your email gets viewed promptly.
Note: After enabling Zia, it won't provide suggestions immediately; it needs some time to read and analyze your emails.
Predefined scheduling options - This provide you with preset choices like "Tomorrow Evening at 20:00 Hrs."
Custom scheduling - In this option, you can select a specific date, time, and time zone of your choice.
You have the choice between Schedule & Close and Schedule options. Selecting Schedule will only close the schedule popup, while the composer will remain open. On the other hand, Schedule & Close will promptly schedule your email for the specified date and time, and it will also close the composer. The email will be scheduled as per your choice. It will be listed under the Email Related List of the record.You can check the status of the email to see if it has been scheduled, delivered and so on.
You can review and edit the email before the scheduled time. Clicking Edit will open the compose window, allowing you to make changes, reschedule, or uncheck the box to send the email immediately. To cancel a scheduled email, you can simply delete it from your related list.
Note:
The ability to edit or delete a scheduled email before it's sent is decided as per the data sharing settings for emails within the org. Learn more.
Best time to email as suggested by CRM is available only for the Leads and Contacts module.
To schedule an email, a user will require the Send Email permission in their profiles.
For legacy users who configured their emails before January 2023, the Emails tab will remain available. However, for new users or those who configured their emails after January, the Emails tab will not be accessible. Additionally, in the near future, the Emails tab will be deprecated entirely. For more details, please refer to thiscommunity post.
Using SalesInbox
Directly from a Record within a Module
When sending emails, you have the option to attach documents from your local drive, Zoho Workdrive, and Google Docs. It's important to keep in mind that you can send emails exclusively from the Leads, Contacts, Deals, Purchase Order, Sales Orders, Quotes, and Invoices modules.
To attach documents
Navigate to the required module (Leads, Contacts, Accounts, etc.) within your CRM account.
In the Module Home page, select a record.
In the Record's details page, under Emails related list, click Send Mail. You can locate the attachment within the email composer.
In the Email Compose window, select the option through you want to upload an attachment.
Note
When emails are sent via Zoho CRM, you can attach files up to 10MB.
When the emails are sent via IMAP or email relay, you can attach files up to 30MB.
Bounced Emails
There are a couple of reasons why an email might bounce and fail to reach its intended recipient. These reasons are typically categorized as either hard bounces or soft bounces.
Soft bounces represent temporary obstacles preventing email delivery, and they can be attributed to factors such as:
The recipient's mailbox being full.
The email message being excessively large.
The recipient's email server being temporarily unavailable.
In contrast, hard bounces most commonly occur due to an invalid email address. Other situations in which even a valid email address might result in a hard bounce include:
Email delivery being blocked by the recipient's email server.
The recipient having unsubscribed from the mailing list.
If, while sending an email from Zoho CRM, you receive an alert message stating Mail Address does not exist, it's likely a hard bounce. There's a possibility that you won't be able to send further emails to the same email address.
Receiving Emails
You will receive emails in your Zoho CRM system when you have integrated your mailbox (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Yahoo) with Zoho CRM. The CRM system automatically synchronizes emails received from your leads, contacts, and other stakeholders from the configured mailbox and associates them with the respective records under the Emails related list on the corresponding Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Vendors, or other module's record pages. Furthermore, emails related to the contacts associated with a deal will be displayed under the Email section on the Deals page.
Important Notes
Leads, contacts, and deals with no email address will not display any emails in their Email section.
Changes made to the email address (for leads or contacts) will only fetch emails linked to the new email address. Emails linked to the previous email address will no longer be available in the CRM.
Changing the mailbox (the email address configured for Zoho CRM) will not display emails from the previously configured mailbox.
Emails received from the secondary email address are synced in the record's emails related list.
The syncing of emails received from custom email addresses will depend on your custom email field preferences.
Add email attachments to related lists or WorkDrive
Emails received from customers or colleagues often include attachments that you may wish to store within the CRM record for easy access. Rather than downloading or manually attaching these files, you can conveniently add them to an Attachment related list or upload them to your Zoho WorkDrive.
This approach ensures that other members of your organization, who have permission for a particular record, can effortlessly access these attachments whenever necessary, without the need to navigate through a lengthy email thread.
Any image, document, or file attached in the email can be directly included in the record's attachments within the Attachment related list, in your WorkDrive storage.
Note:
The attachments will count towards your file storage limit. That is, based on the storage limit that is allowed for the subscribed edition you will be able to attach.
The system will not identify duplicate attachments at the moment.
Custom email fields preferences
The custom email fields preferences can be enabled only when all the users in an organization are in the latest email configuration.
This is currently supported for IMAP and POP3 users only.
If any org has active Gmail API integration, for now they cannot enable this preference and this will be supported in few months.
By default, emails received from custom email field addresses will not be synced in the record's emails related list. You can enable this by doing the following:
Navigate to Setup > Channels > Email.
In the Email Configuration tab, select Custom Email Preference.
Toggle Custom email fields preferences based on your needs. Enabling it will sync emails from custom email fields in a record's email related list.
Note
The email sharing settings configured for the primary and secondary addresses will also apply for custom email addresses.
Sending and receiving emails from custom email field addresses is supported in Leads, Contacts, Vendors, and custom modules.
Learn more about sending and receiving emails and the related insights here.