An essential part of making Trail work for you; getting your Email Integration connected! Doing this streamlines and automates having a copy of your client email communications filed away into their Profile, which makes record-keeping a breeze!
In this article you will learn:
How Trail's Email Integration works
Best Practice
Benefits
No Email Integration?
Next Steps
- How to Connect your Email Integration (links)
- Common FAQs
How Trail's Email Integration Works
Trail's email integration essentially allows us to send out emails using your email address and also access your mailbox to scan, take a copy and place a copy of client emails in Trail.
When you first connect
💡 How this Works 💡
When you first connect your email address to Trail's email integration, Trail will do a "7-year record" scan of historic emails.
This means we will pick up any client emails you've had in the past 7 years (for record keeping requirements) and assign them to the relevant client profiles (more on this below). Depending on the size of your mailbox & emails, and the complexity of your mail server, this process may take a long time. However, once it has completed, all your 7-year historic emails will be showing in Trail.
This scanner runs along our usual 30-minute scanner of new emails which is explained below.
Assigning Client Emails to Profiles
💡 How this Works 💡
Trail scans your email inbox every 30 minutes or so, and it looks for new emails. During this scan, we will put a copy of the email (including text and attachments) into Trail's Mailbox page.
We will also assign this copy of the email to a Profile if we can find a match to the Contacts actively linked email addresses. We only match to Contacts' email addresses when they are marked as "Participants, Non-Dependents or Dependents".
This is what an actively linked Contact's email address looks like in a Profile:
Note this is a contact marked as "Participant"
Note the blue link icon next to the contact's email address which means it email scanning is active.
Sending out Emails using your Email Address
💡 How this Works 💡
If you have a working and active Email Integration with Trail:
When you send an email from Trail, what Trail does is it then forwards this email to your email provider (Microsoft or Google), who then forwards this email to your client (recipient email address).
Therefore to the client, the email looks like it has come directly from you via your integrated email address.
Before you send out an email from Trail, an email modal will appear to allow you to make any edits, add any extra CC'd or BCC'd recipients and add any attachments before sending - example shown below:
Best Practice Recommendations
Don't DELETE your client emails. Archive them or allow them to be filed into an active email folder.
Benefits of using Email Integration
Here are some great reasons for having your email integration connected in Trail:
It allows you to email clients directly from Trail using your integrated email address 🚀 This means clients view these emails as sent from you directly!
Trail automatically pulls a copy of the emails you send (from Trail or not) and receive from clients. It then will display them in the relevant client's Profile Timeline 📘 This means automated documentation
No Email Integration?
Without email integration, all your emails will be sent from either:
Your company email address if you have set up Organisation Email Integration.
The adviser@gettrail.com email address if you have not set up Organisation Email Integration (the replies from clients will go directly back to you).
Next Steps
Connecting your Email Integration
There are specific instructions depending on your email provider; we currently support Google/ Gmail and Microsoft Office/ Outlook.
Please click the relevant link below for a step-by-step guide for integrating your email:
Email integration can occur on both a personal and organisational level. To find out more about how to do this on a organisation level here.