Not really sure if this is the right forum category but I hope so. Also hope I will make my questions clear. I have a client, where I do marketing and someone else has developed the web site and maintains the server. We were able to compare directly to the database and recently discovered that they are not receiving all leads from the website. Some ‘disappeared’.
They are sent as an email from the web form with the inquirer’s email adress as the ‘from’ address, not the company’s own email address and domain. Ie, the from address varies and can be anything really like xyz@hotmail.com. After some testing we noticed that the web site inquiries came through when we used the company’s email address as the from address. Email is hosted with Google Apps.
The problem is that this company receives a ton of leads and their entire workflow is email based with lots of email folders. Now when all the emails have the same from address it is harder for them to keep track of leads.
My first question is, is it common to use the from field like they did in the past. I am not surprised it causes problems since you are basically ‘faking’ an email. 2) Is it common practice to set up emails from a website like this and 3) is there a simple CRM software that would do the job better than using the email client to sort and organize the work.
Any ideas and input would be most welcome. Just explaining this change to the staff is a big challenge so just knowing if it is correct or incorrect to use email addresses as from address like they have done in the past would be a big help.
Imo, what we mean by “best practices” is not necessarily correct or incorrect, it’s just what better fits the needs of a particular business. Now there are ups and downs in using the inquirer’s email as sender instead of the company email. First, there’s a greater chance that they arrive in the Junk folder and disappear from immediate sight, as the mail client sees them coming from xyz@hotmail.com but knows they are actually sent from the company’s vps. The good part would be that a primary filtering is already applied over submissions and the sales persons can directly reach the email address of the lead. It’s not a common practice to set the email field as the from address, this I may say.
Coming to the CRM solution that can be used, of course there are tons of customized software - I have used Relenta, which is also an email based CRM but has superior contact management tools than the email client. The form itself can be integrated with a CRM like SalesForce, so that submissions are automatically converted into contacts for the CRM account. If you think about redesigning the lead generation form to integrate with CRM software, check out 123ContactForm web form and survey builder, it has useful enterprise ready solutions.
One other way to make emails unique per subject is to prefix the subject of the email with [EnquiryCategoryName] (so something like [Product Enquiry] or [Sales]).
If sales people / reps needed direct access to the email address it could be added in the footer of the email and the Reply-To header could be set, this will allow the email header to be set to be From: xyz@company.com but still allow people to hit reply and be addressing the person that sent the email.
I used Sugar CRM a long time ago… we weren’t really using it as a CRM so much as a task manager / tracker but it might be worth a look!