Are you fed up with Bcc’ing your emails to your CRM?

If you are then I have good news for you – I have asked my friends at Vividly Simple to share how to set up Mail Bcc integration with a CRM for Office 365 (using Exchange Online, email hosted in Office 365). And here’s what they said:

First things first:

Let’s start at the beginning – it’s important to determine what type of emails you want to record in your CRM system. You might want to consider the following:

1. Are there any users or groups that you want to include in your CRM; and
2. Do you need to exclude some emails from going into your CRM?
   1. Is there a mechanism in your CRM to ignore or otherwise associate unknown emails with CRM records (customer, user etc)?
   2. What controls should be put in place for controlling which emails are to be copied to the CRM?
   3. Do you want to include inbound, outbound or both in the CRM? It would also be worth a check/update of your data/privacy policies to make sure you are notifying users appropriately.

How to copy all outbound emails to a CRM

There are many different scenarios based on the above questions so in this blog we will use an  example of the setup for the most common scenario – where all outbound emails from sales staff are Bcc’d to a CRM.

Step 1: Setup an Office 365 Group to use in the Bcc rule

If you are an owner/manager with no staff or you have a small number of users that rarely change you can skip this step and go straight to “Configure the Bcc rule in Exchange Admin centre” and add users to the rule instead of a group.

The group will be used to control which users emails are copied to your CRM.  Add members to the group – in this case Sales employees.

NB: Using a group will greatly reduce complexity in administering new starts and job role changes.

Connect into Office 365 with exchange admin (or global admin) user role.

1. Go to admin.office.com, enter admin login and click “groups ->
   1. Group type has to be “distribution List” or “Shared inbox” or “mail enabled Security” (In this example we’ll use “mail enabled security” as we can use the same group to manage access to shared files.
   2. Click “add a group”
2. Give the group a name and group email address that all members can access and work together – thus reducing overlapping work or not relying on an individual to respond. Either allow, or block, external users from being able to send to the email address.  Add a description and press “add”

 

 

After creating the group, assign users to the group.  In the admin centre click users -> Active users.

From the list you can click the radial button next to the users you want to add, then click “assign users to Group” at the top of the page.  Pick the group you want to add them to and click the group and press “Save”.

You now have a group, with users assigned that can be used in the next steps.

 

Step 2: Configure the Bcc rule in Exchange Admin centre

Connect into Office 365 with exchange admin (or global admin) user role.

1. either go to admin.office.com, enter admin login and click “admin centers” -> exchange, or
2. go to office.com, enter admin login and click “admin” app, then “admin centers” -> exchange

Once in Exchange Admin Center, click “rules” under mail flow add a new rule by pressing the “new” button ( ) and select “create a new rule” and complete the fields. 

1. Name – this is a name that describes the rule in the rule list, a good description will help when reviewing rules.
2. Apply this rule if… select “The sender is a member of” which will open a dialogue box (if you need to change it later you can click the list to the right of the apply action box – where in the example below it says “test-mail-security”), enter “sales” group you set up earlier, or you can add individual users by selecting them in the list, but you’ll have to do more to maintain the list. If you want to only apply this rule when sending to external users press the “add condition” and use the “recipient is internal/external” and set to outside the organisation (it’s also possible to say for specific customers/partners using the domain option).
3. Do the following… select “Bcc the message to” which will open a dialogue box (if you need to change it later you can click the list to the right of the apply action box – where in the example below it says “CRM@CRM.com”) enter the CRM email address in the “check names” box in the dialogue box.
4. Press More options this will open further options for the rule, you’ll need it set to “enforce” and unless you want more rules to act on these emails tick the “stop processing more rules”

NB: if you have multiple rules, check that other rules don’t interfere with what you expect to happen to your Bcc rules.

5. Comments use this to provide a description of what you are trying to do, how and who added the rule (it’ll all make sense now, but in two years when you are trying to update it or find a mail related issue it’ll significantly improve your ability to find the issue. In this example a comment along the lines of “Bcc emails to the CRM (CRM systems) sent from sales members (identified as Sales group) –  last rule change DATE by USER.”

 

This blog was written on behalf of Blake Consultants by Vividly Simple.

 

This is what Vividly Simple say about themselves

We are here to help our small business customers to choose and use the technology that’s right for them.

We offer helpful advice and jargon-free IT Support, bringing peace of mind to business owners and managers who don’t understand, or don’t want to understand how their technology works, they just need it to work.

Our services are fully managed, leaving you free to focus on what you do best.

If you have any questions on bcc’ing your emails to your CRM or any other IT related questions, give the team at Vividly Simple a call or drop an email to help@vividlysimple.com.

 

How Blake Consultants can support you

My goal is to help you as a business owner to grow your business, by getting the most value out of your 3 most valuable assets:

1. your contacts/data
2. your processes and systems
3. yourselves

When you make the most of your contacts/data you are in the best place possible to increase your revenue. When you have efficient, repeatable processes in your business you reduce the cost of sales. Both of these give the business owner more head space to focus on growing their business.

The overall result is an increase in net profit.

I help my clients grow their businesses by:

> Designing and creating bespoke Contact Relationship Management (CRM) systems (often CapsuleCRM), integrating with systems such as Xero and Mailchimp to enable the business to make the most of their contacts, manage their pipeline and provide a consistently high level of service to their clients – resulting in an increased net profit year on year by increasing revenue and reducing costs.

> Creating the right systems and processes to improve efficiency and free up the business owners time to do more of what they want, and need to do, and less of what they don’t want, or need, to do.  Using the correct business tools will help nurture the growth potential of any business. Blake Consultants work with a number of business tools such as CapsuleCRM, Mailchimp and Xero, and weaving these into the fabric of your business will help you move from today’s struggle to tomorrow’s reward.

> I specialise in CapsuleCRM and Mailchimp as standalone systems and joining them together often with Xero to provide a cost effective, efficient foundation needed to grow.

Running my own business and working with clients for over 9 years gives me insight and experience of the issues and challenges faced every day by business owners. I take pride in my creative, can do attitude to turning challenges into opportunities.

To learn how we can support your growth pathway, let’s schedule a no obligation call to discuss taking your business to the next step. Please click here to find a time which works for you.