Changing How Salespeople Do Email: Introducing MailMagnet for Zoho CRM

Email is a necessary evil these days. It’s the most widely used form of communication across companies, and yet precisely because of that widespread use, most people’s inboxes are cluttered with messages.

So, along the way we’ve invented labels, folders, SPAM filters, rules, stars, flags, smart algorithms and more as different ways to prioritize your inbox.

But none of that helps salespeople stay on top of customer communications easily, because they were not designed specifically for salespeople. One of our CRM customers was recently telling us that about 60% of the email their salespeople get is NOT related to the deals he is working on. We know, too, from our own experience that a high percentage of the emails that our sales team gets is not directly related to the deals they are working on.

So we decided to look at this from a fresh perspective, and we asked ourselves one question: Who knows best about the deals you are working on? It’s not your email system – it’s your CRM. So expecting your email system to prioritize your email for you is nonsense – it should be your CRM system.

And that’s why we want to change how salespeople do email. Salespeople will, in the long-term, do email within their CRM system. And that’s why today we’re introducing Zoho MailMagnet.

It works just like the name implies – like a magnet for mails. Which mails? The ones that are relevant to you, right now, depending on what deals you are working on. Only your CRM system knows this. And when you turn on MailMagnet for Zoho CRM, it instantly looks at your inbox and presents only those emails that are relevant for you.

We’ve had for a while something related available for our Zoho CRM Customers – the Zoho Mail Add-On. The Mail Add-On allows customers to keep track of all incoming and outgoing customers messages from within CRM – even share customer communications given the right permissions, of course. And it doesn’t require you to cc: anyone – and it works even when using your mobile phone’s email client.

But our Mail Add-On didn’t solve the problem of sorting what is important (customer/leads/deals mails) from what is not – and do so directly inside Zoho CRM. We’re combining what until today was the Mail Add-On and this brand-new functionality into the new Zoho MailMagnet. Existing Mail Add-On customers will get this automatically, at no additional cost. It’s important to note that MailMagnet works with pretty much any modern email provider you might have – Zoho Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, your ISP, etc.

MailMagnet is not just a feature – it signals our vision and aim to change the way salespeople interact with their email. Today we’ve taken the second step. We’re already getting some feedback from some beta customers we gave a preview of this to and it’s positive – we’d love to hear what you think.

Comments

44 Replies to Changing How Salespeople Do Email: Introducing MailMagnet for Zoho CRM

  1. What about controlling this through an admin account? Cant setup mail addon one by one for our 200~ users! And Rodrigo, "thousands and thousands" of users happy with POP3 and not needing IMAP? Show us your active number of users using pop.

  2. Hello,
    I'm new to Zoho CRM and I subscribed to the email add-on for $5 a month. I configured my POP account so that I could send and receive emails from within the CRM using my work email address.Currently I am able to associate sent emails with the contacts in the CRM. However, I'm having trouble associating incoming emails with my CRM contacts and so far it's not happening. Kindly provide some guidance to get this problem resolved.Thanks

  3. I'm feeling pretty slow on this subject, but I'm still a bit in the dark on what is needed to use Mail Magnet. Our office currently uses an Office 365 plan for Exchange service. Outlook 2010 is the mail client on the desktop, and Office 365 provides a BES server for Blackberries, and we use ActiveSync for people with other smartphones. If we wanted to take advantage of these new features, would we have to change anything about our current setup, or can Zoho Mail/Mail Magnet be added on top of the existing services? Is management completely through a web interface, or can you manage through an email client like Outlook?

  4. D -Thanks for the comments. We’re sorry to hear this is a deal breaker for you, we’ve noted your passionate interest in having MailMagnet operate through IMAP.
    I wish we could offer MailMagnet the way you suggest, but we can’t. Maybe in the future, but we can’t promise anything at this point.I’m happy to hear you’re otherwise happy with Zoho CRM.best,Rodrigo

  5. no way you are not missing the imap funcitonality.How are we, as users supposed to sync our emails when emails sent through your pop3/mail magnet addon on crm, can not be tracked in sent items in our regular imap enabled phones and mail clients outside of soho?
    Being tied to your slow web-mail solution and slow and lacking mail magnet funcionality (that also fails to get pull mails into magnet from other accounts associated in the mail client inside zoho crm) and only pulls mails from ONE primary e-mail account inside e-mail and blatantly ignores the neeed for small businesses to get mail magnet funcionality from several accounts associated with the lead. zoho pop mail ? Huge dealbreaker. for an otherwise very very capable crm solutions that is currently unrivalled by anyone in the field. this is not a rant talk. happy crm customer – unhappy soho maill addon customer inside the same CRM

  6. Jure – thanks for your comments and the feedback. We regret the IMAP client is a deal braker for your at this point. To your question, we do use Zoho CRM in-house of course, and we do use it with MailMagnet, and like thousands and thousands of customers, we don’t miss the IMAP connection. We understand we can’t please everyone, though, We’ve noted your concern, but unfortunately we can’t promise anything else at the moment.

  7. there anybody in ZOHO Corp using their own CRM?” If so, they should notice that IMAP Client is a deal breaker and you cannot replace IMAP with any MailMagnet. Please do not replay that there is a lot of technical issues regarding etc., the good salesman is a salesman on the field therefore he/she is using different devices and he/she needs to know all about his/her email status – no way with POP3. We’re losing days because there is no complete IMAP integration and I’m sure that I’m not alone. As I wrote in forum (of course w/o reply from ZOHO) w/o IMAP client I’ll find another provider. Too bad – a nice, decent, good product with limited functionality.

  8. Guys
    thank you for doing such great things, however I really keep questioning to myself: “Is there anybody in ZOHO Corp using their own CRM?” If so, zhey should notice that IMAP Client is a deal breaker and you cannot replace IMAP with any MailMagnet. Please do not replay that there is a lot of technical issues regarding etc., the good salesman is a salesman on the field therefore he/she is using different devices and he/she needs to know all about his/her email status – no way with POP3. We’re losing days because there is no complete IMAP integration and I’m sure that I’m not alone. As I wrote in forum (of course w/o reply from ZOHO) w/o IMAP client I’ll find another provider. Too bad – a nice, decent, good product with limited functionality.Jure

  9. Mail Magnet sounds like a good concept but it needs basic functionality to be usable:1. Mail is not marked as read/unread
    2. Mail cannot be flagged or prioritised
    3. Any markings proformed in the main Mail function, are not shown in the CRM Mail function?So I am not sure how Mail Magnet can help since we still need to use the main Mail functionality?Robert

  10. I was so excited when receiving the email announcing email magnet and so disappointed you still haven’t achieved what is needed… which is why I believe many are asking for IMAP support… here’s what I know need and suspect many others would want to:I want an email “Magnet” to listen to my email accounts, find any emails that have an address attached to a record in ZOHO and save a “COPY” of that email to that record for both sent and received, nothing else… I don’t care if you use IMAP or POP, as long as you “find” and “save” a COPY of the email to the record so I have one place I go to see all emails associated with that address… simple… no need to further sync that email with my email account at all….I can explain this solution in detail to one of you reps at any time… comments?

  11. I cannot find into my account the mail magnet add on… how can I subscribe? how much does it cost? i currently have the free edition including mobile application. Kind Regards

  12. Like it a lot — especially the ‘add task’ feature. However, I can’t figure out how to delete messages I’ve seen or don’t want in the message box. Some that I deleted from my inbox are still in my message box. How do I delete?

  13. Great. At last I can get from an email to the clients record without having to search using the clients name. Unfortunately the strange way you’ve implemented this means I’ll probably rarely use it.You mailmagnet list doesn’t show me what I’ve already read in mailmagnet. It doesn’t show what I’ve already read on the CRM email screen. It doesn’t tell me how many unread mails I have. I can’t see which mails have attachments. I can’t see a preview of the mails. I can’t move mails I’ve dealt with to other folders. I can’t see any way to get the emails off the list. I can’t forward mail. In short I can’t do anything I can do in the normal mail screen except reply, add a task or go through to the client’s record.Why didn’t you just add a flag and/or filter to the normal mail screen to identify client emails? With a drop down box so if I selected the email I could add a task or select the client record. I don’t need another list, just a refinement to the existing one.Meantime, I still can’t save an attachment straight to the client’s record. And I still can’t even see a single list on the client’s record of all correspondence between our staff and the client. Never mind linking suppliers emailed quotes to client records.Still, if the level your video was pitched at indicates your target market, they’ll probably not notice. I despair.

  14. I agree with @kate would be really great if you knew on what basis it decides the email is relevant to you. Our CRM has 15,000 records approx, and any leads etc that aren’t active/being worked on are assigned (i.e Lead/Contact Owner) to me as Sales Director. It would be great to have the ability to have some records as “house account” or NO OWNER – particularly as you get campaigns etc going to
    2ndly we use one CRM for managing multiple businesses and we need to be able to allow certain users to select a from address from within CRM when sending an email rather than being forced to use the primary email attached to their user ID.

  15. Nice tool – been working for a few days. BUT – it doesnt show when email has attachment – or rather I cant see where it should be doing that …. would be good if you could see the attchment and get the option to save it to ZohoDocs/Dropbox or as an attachment to CRM record.Thanks

  16. Sounds interesting, but too bad we have no instructions on what it actually does, what it looks like in CRM, or how to activate or use it.

  17. I can see the little envelope symbol but when I click on it it says no messages, even when there are emails allocated to a potential or contact? So any advice on how to actually set it up would be good.

  18. I love the new Mail Magnet feature. It easily and quickly lets me focus on just the emails that pertain to possible sales. Thanks!

  19. The mail magnet needs two tweeks. Red X to delete emails from magnet drop down and need to be able to click the magnet icon to retract from the expanded magnet emails.

  20. Hello Craig,If you use our web forms, leads are automatically created in CRM. Please follow the instructions in our online help to set up CRM web forms:
    http://www.zoho.com/crm/help/web-forms/index.html Can you please share your webform URL so that I will be in a better position to help you.BTW, when you add a contact from Zoho Mail to CRM, first time we will show the “Contact added successfully” message.
    Subsequently we will show only “Contact already exists.” message. A screenshot could help us to identify the issue.Gopal

  21. I use webforms to collect emails. When you receive an email from a new contact you can select “Add to CRM” but the addition does not allow me to review the data before creating the contact, thus each new addition would say “web form submission” over and over.Any solutions to this?

  22. Thanks everyone for the interest and the comments. Some of you commented about IMAP integration, so I’m sure this is top of mind for many others out there too. I wanted to clarify how MailMagnet works with IMAP, Zoho Mail and other mail services.Here’s the most important part:
    If you want an email you read inside Zoho CRM, using MailMagnet, to be marked as read in your web email client or mobile, you CAN do this with Zoho Mail. When you are using both Zoho Mail and Zoho CRM, MailMagnet works so much better.You can use any email service with MailMagnet, however mails will not be marked as read in your mail server when you read them in Zoho CRM.So if you want to keep your mails in sync between your mail client, web mail, mobile and Zoho CRM, you can do that – with Zoho Mail. Currently we have no plans of supporting this functionality for any other email service (Gmail, Exchange, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc).To be clear, Zoho Mail supports IMAP – as an IMAP Server, but Zoho Mail is not an IMAP Client (i.e. Microsoft Exchange is an IMAP Sever, Outlook is the client). We have no plans to allow Zoho Mail to pull your email from your ISP through IMAP – there are many technical reasons for this which I won’t bore you with! This is pretty common across all the other major web mail providers.Rodrigo

  23. Lawrence -Someone from our support team should be following up with you today or tomorrow. Please let me know if that’s not the case, or contact us through @ZohoCares and we’ll make we get back to you.Rodrigo

  24. My discussions account suddenly stopped resolving urls without https.I have had the url: http://forums.cartweaver.com for years and it has worked fine, On this last Friday this url is returning a 404 page not found error and the system is requiring https. I tried modifying the primary domain to include the “S” and figured I’s add the same without the S as a secondary domain, but the system won’t let me. So my forum is essentially down because all the users are accustomed to the regular url, and they have been down since Friday.I have sent numerous emails to support and filled out the support form on the ZoHo site and have made several calls all to no avail. Is there anyone monitoring this forum than can help get this situation fixed?

  25. I spotted the little envelope at the top of the screen the other day – works well. As soon as i clicked on it I could tell what it was for. Allows me to look at e-mails related to what I am working on and the people that matter and look through the rest later. Nice one Zoho.

  26. Hi
    I connected MailChimp with Zoho via Cazoomi API.Now Im going to implement Mandrill to get metrix for transaktional mail and will also implement it in Thunderbird. Will Mailmagnet work with the other apps? If so it would be a great tool for sales communication.I also use computer, tablet and smartphone for reading and sending mail

  27. Hi Rodrigo,I am fairly new to Zoho but am looking at implementing it in different companies. The Mail Magnet seems a good addition to the CRM package but this IMAP issue seems to be a major hurdle. Any idea if, when and how long until you have a fix for this issue?

  28. Can you share with the world why IMAP is not allowed in any CRM? zoho is making a great step forward with email inside, but NO IMAP is rough.
    Is there a work around for using IMAP via an app or other add-on?
    Keep up the great work!

  29. Hi Rodrigo,You’re right guys email is the key to getting the most out of the CRM system. There is still a few pieces missing from the jigsaw, keep up the good work.Will mail magnet allow users to link or tag emails from the mail add-on to Potentials & Cases? Emails listed against the contact are very difficult to follow.IMAP access to mail accounts would be very helpful, specifically Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365. This has been on the wishlist for a long time.Regards
    Daragh

  30. Darcy -Please look for it under “Mail Add-On”, some of our customers’ UI are not reflecting the change yet.Rodrigo

  31. Jason -Thanks for the heads-up. Our Support team will contact you.
    We edited your post a little bit so it doesn’t display your email.Rodrigo

  32. Only as the Administrator am I seeing the MailMagnet icon. One of my users who has the Mail AddOn already doesn’t see his icon?

  33. I was looking forward to start using Zoho mail, as well as this tool, but not being to use imap certainly is a deal breaker. I’m not sure how any business that stays busy doesn’t use imap in this day and age.

  34. This looks intriguing. I wish I could use it.But I can’t.I can’t because Zoho Mail does not support IMAP access to my mail account. With IMAP access to my mail account none of the e-mails I send from within Zoho CRM or Zoho Mail get synchronized with our mail hosting company’s server. That means when I send something from my ZCRM the outgoing e-mail is copied to our server. In turn, that means I cannot access those e-mails from phone or tablet. In addition, incoming mail may or may not be marked as read on the server.Unfortunately, for many of us this new functionality can’t be used.

  35. Kendra -It should appear live in your account now.
    And yes, it is listed as the Zoho Mail Add-On, we will update the name inside the product pretty soon.Rodrigo

  36. When will this add-on appear in the Setup of Zoho CRM? I don’t currently see it? Is it just the Zoho Mail add-on or will it have its own heading?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

The comment language code.
By submitting this form, you agree to the processing of personal data according to our Privacy Policy.

Related Posts