Email Integration for Sales teams

Hey everyone!

Some of my teammates and I were working through the email integrations and wanted to share what we found. We played with the integration through a Sales lens and created a use case based on common cases from our interactions with users like you!

We set out as a manufacturer of customized beer glasses, looking for ways to optimize our customer journey using monday.com. We embedded a monday.com form into our website for client purchase order requests.

We wanted to move away from our current process of manually emailing our customers from our personal email to update them when an order is received, in production, and shipped, as this process isn’t scalable with rapid growth. This included a company google doc file in the email, so we would need this to be automatically sent as well.

We also collaborate with a 3rd party glass maker (who’s a guest in the account) who helps us in the production phase of the customized glasses. Once we’ve reviewed the request, we want to simultaneously send an email to our producer with details of the work order in addition to notifying the customer on the order status.

Moreover, we wanted to make sure that all follow-up communication on the email sent will be housed within its item on our board.
Fixing these pain points would be a huge time saver for us and allow us to work solely in monday.com!

If you haven’t had a chance to learn about forms, I definitely recommend doing so: Forms! by monday.com

We first built out our board with the necessary columns for the data needed, then built out a form to post on our website so our users could give us everything we need in one place.

This is what our form ended up looking like:
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It translated to this on our board:
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Once we got the form up and running, the fun part came: adding in the automations!

It’s important to note that though we set these up via Gmail, it is the same automations and capabilities on Outlook!
First off, we wanted to send an automated email to the customer letting them know their order was received. As you can see in the image below, we clicked into the email and customized it to give the order details and all the other information we wanted to include.

We also assigned the “Person” to the email column, as it’s a field on the form! for the customer to enter their email:
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Next, we created the automation to let the customer know when their order is being processed. We used the automation “When Status Changes to X, send an email to this person.” You can see we assigned the Status to the status column’s “Processing,” and the “Person” column to our guest third-party vendor:


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And another identical automation to the customer with the email message to show exactly what we wanted to say:
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Now, when we change the status to “Processing,” an email is sent to both the vendor and customer!

Finally, we set an automation for when the Status changes to “Done,” to send an email to the customer letting them know their order is on the way:
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The best part is all of these automated emails show up in the item’s updates section, timestamped and all!


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And just like that, our entire, lengthy workflow was brought down to a single, automated board.

If you want to learn more about forms, definitely check them out at the link I shared earlier—otherwise, let me know your thoughts/questions! :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Carey

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Thanks for this post Carey, we’ve been considering using Forms for some client-facing interactions and this is a nice approach to some of the updates that could be automated. I do have a couple of questions:

  1. Have you set up any way for the client (original form requester) to reply to these emails and have those fed back into the Monday.com pulse updates?

  2. Likewise, do you have any way to send out custom emails from Monday.com, that would get sent to the client and tracked in the pulse updates? I know we could send an email outside of Monday and CC the email address for the post, I was just curious if you had any other solutions for that.

Thank you!

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@carey-monday.com beautiful! We have been doing the same and moved away from personally emailing a couple hundred people to automating all of it. When we are ready to invite instructors to come teach the next trimester we simply change the status to INVITE YES and let the email integration send the template invitation to the instructor, if they reply accepting the job, the reply goes into the pulse, it’s awesome! . Gmail integration and pre-made-templates are a wonderful thing!

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Hey Ari! Great questions.

  1. Yes! You can set up email integrations from Gmail/Outlook to monday.com as well. This is the recipe you’ll want to use for your use case:
    image
    You can update the “email” portion of the recipe to have certain characteristics, like “When the subject of the email is [fill in the blank],” for instance!

  2. In terms of custom emails within monday.com, I’m assuming you’re referring to personal, custom, not-template emails, correct? If so, though there is one workaround to accomplish this, it does take a bit of work and you need to treat it carefully. Essentially, you can set up a status label that says “custom email,” then use the automation “when status changes to [custom email], send email to the email column.” Then, you can edit that “email” in the recipe to be your custom email.
    The restrictions are that each user will need to create this recipe (as you can only edit automations you set up), and if you ever accidentally change a label to your “custom email” label, it will send whatever is in that recipe to whoever is in the column of the item that you changed the status label of. Does that make sense? It’s up to you if it’s worth it or not, but the workaround does exist! :slight_smile:

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@alejencia, this is such an awesome use case! I’m so glad that the view/integration is working well for you and saving you from those hundreds of emails! :smiley:

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Nice post Carey, thanks.

A couple of questions.

  1. What’s the realistic limit of people to have in a list such as this? For example if the Board is linked to a form on website, and hundreds, or thousands of pulses come in, is it workable to manage a board in this way? What become the limitations and challenge when operating such a list at scale?

2 Have you found a way to email everyone in a list at once, without having to change the Status of each one one by one? I’ve tried to work out how to do this with the automation ‘When Column changes’, but cannot work out what ‘changes’ trigger an email (other than changing status of a particular pulse).

  1. Is it possible to only email out pulses in a given group. For example, if there’s a group of ‘active users’ and ‘dormant users’ is it possible to mass mail only the active ones?

Thanks for your help,

Andy

@AndyClayton great questions!

  1. This really depends on your workflow and how you want to operate–do you want to see your leads and edit them in any way (assign them to sales reps, analyze their potential, etc)? Feel free to email us at support@monday.com and we’d be happy to dive into this with you! :blush:

  2. While column changes and date arrivals are the two triggers for sending introductory emails via form submissions, you can use a status change trigger combined with this one:
    Screen Shot 2020-02-18 at 10.03.16 AM
    This will read "when new item is created, change the status to “intro email sent.” From there, you can use automations to send an email and move the item to different groups!

  3. At your scale, especially with the automation above, what do you think about breaking up your “active user” group into different groups? Perhaps by sales rep, geographic region, account size, or some other metric? While groups don’t have the capacity to be recognized for their title in an automation, you can certainly use a status column to differentiate an active or dormant user.

Let us know your thoughts! :smile:

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Hi everyone, thanks for your great suggestion of using Monday.com for email. My question is, is there any way that we can send an formatted template email (for example can highlight text, add footer images, bold, italic
) using Monday?

It’s the same with all the above idea, just except that instead of sending the plain email with text online, we can send the email which is formatted.

This is critical for our school since we want to keep the branding when communicating with clients using the automated emails.

THank you.
Andy

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Hi @AndyVu! Thanks for your feedback, at the moment you’re not able to format email templates but we’re happy to have our product team review this as many users would find this useful :slight_smile: Stay tuned! Cheers!

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Thank you so much Carey. I think I understand better now about these automations. We’re going to use Survey Monkey for our core lists, and then set up an automation to Monday for those that respond, for a more personalised follow up.

Thanks

Andy

3 Likes

Hi there, I understand you can integrate gmail to Monday.com which we have successfully done and are now receiving updates in our update boxes.

  1. My question is if there is a way you can automatically reply from Monday and also capture outgoing emails without having to manually copy and paste the pulse ID?

  2. Is there a way to quickly filter out certain emails that are confidential so not everyone who’s subscribed to the board can see those confidential emails in the update section?

Thanksa lot

Hey @val_staiger1! Great questions! To be fully transparent, neither option is available right now–BCC’ing the pulse ID is the best way to have that carry over, and all updates can be viewed by anyone who has access to a board. That said, we’d love to see you post this as a feature request in our Feedback section of the community!

You can see how to do that here: Submit an Idea - monday Community Forum :blush: Thanks for bringing these up. It’s ideas like this from users like you that help us get to where we want to be!

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Hi Carey,
Me again. This really feels like a part of the monday.com platform ripe for improvement.

The way the system is currently set up, you can go in one of two directions for how you set up your boards for communicating with clients, and each has a big drawback:

  1. Separate boards per client or per campaign. In this model, you keep all of the information related to one customer, or one campaign (or production run, or whatever) on one board. Their whole life cycle is contained in one engagement log. The challenge with this model is that the email automations need to be re-built each time. If you have multiple clients, all on different boards, but want to use the same email templates, this is very time-consuming to set up.

  2. Everything on one board. You can go for one ‘super-board’ (and use tags to search by customer, campaign, project). This has the advantage that you only have to build one set of email automations, but the problem here is that the columns and statuses then become the limiting factor, and also prone to error. Let’s say you have 20-30 standard email templates that need to be sent out in the lifecycle of one project or customer, then that’s a lot of different status columns, and also very unwieldy.

The uncomfortable conclusion for us, because we are huge monday.com fans, is that monday.com still doesn’t feel quite ready for real email automation.

Is this a direction that the dev team are working on? I realise it’s a tough nut to crack, but it would be such a huge boost to the value of the system.

Love to know your thoughts,

Warm regards,

Andy

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I just wanted to underline how awesome this feature would be! I was searching for exactly that functionality as well. Is there currently a hack/workaround known for formatting and adding graphics etc?

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Hi, this thread is from last year. We are looking to add footers to our automated emails. Has this come to fruition yet?

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Even allowing html would help, so we could add bold or italics to emails.

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Hi, curious if there has been any progress on the ability to format email temples with the email integration? We work in Hebrew so the very basic ability of formatting our text from right to left is pretty big issue for us.

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Hi, I’m wondering if there has been any progress with some of the issues raised above: 1. the RTL text option in the outlook integration , and 2. including a footage in the email.

In addition, an ability to add CC’s in the email would be awesome as well.

Thanks:)