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Salesforce Apps, available through the Salesforce Appexchange, serve a diverse array of business services to help enhance your admins’ operational efficiency.
Among the multitude of functionalities, the role of email infrastructure stands out as integral. And it touches upon critical aspects of your email flows, including:
- Synchronization
- Analytics
- Templates
- Campaigns
- Security
- Compliance
- Document generation and validation
To explain it a bit simpler, Salesforce is about the seamless integration of email communication with customer data. In turn, you get to have personalized interactions with your clients. Also, you get to make informed business decisions based on those interactions.
All things considered, it’s safe to say that the existence and usability of these apps also helped with widespread Salesforce adoption.
Speculations aside, we delve into some of the most effective Salesforce applications for various components of your email infrastructure. So, let’s dive right in.
Best Salesforce Apps: A Quick Overview
When evaluating Salesforce apps related to email infrastructure, it’s essential to keep in mind that the “best” app depends heavily on specific business needs and workflows.
For example, sales cloud users looking for ways to improve their sales process might require different apps than service cloud users. But, to guide this exploration, we’ve considered the universal factors that contribute to an array of business workflows related to email infrastructure.
Firstly, the features offered by the app play a significant role. We looked for apps that provide a robust set of capabilities, giving users the flexibility to manage various aspects of email infrastructure efficiently.
Secondly, we took 15+ years of our experience in building and maintaining email infrastructures and distilled it into editorial chunks to give you a first-hand assessment of the given apps.
We aim to gauge the following:
- Real-world applications
- Reliability
- How the apps match up to their advertised promises.
Also, we’ve checked how these apps have aided businesses in solving their unique challenges.
Finally, compatibility with Salesforce is a non-negotiable criterion.
The chosen apps integrate seamlessly with Salesforce.com, ensuring users can conveniently leverage their capabilities within the CRM environment.
However, some of the listed apps are paid-only and geared more towards advanced Salesforce org users, which with be explicitly stated within the review. Some also offer free options and, as there’s no free Salesforce, it’s a good way to test things out before you commit to a plan.
Having accounted for all of the above, we’ve selected and categorized a range of Salesforce apps that excel in handling specific email infrastructure tasks. Read on for more details.
Salesforce Apps for Email Synchronization
Efficient email synchronization is pivotal in streamlining your Salesforce operations, ensuring all relevant communication is captured and accessible within the platform. With these, you take the functionality of the Lightning app to the next level.
Anyway, here’s one of the top apps in this arena.
Cirrus Insight
Cirrus Insight acts as a bridge between the Salesforce environment and your inbox, reducing the tedious task of constantly flipping between email and Salesforce.
Key features
The automatic sync of emails and attachments from your inbox to Salesforce truly stands out. It enables you to efficiently store and access every relevant piece of communication within Salesforce.
Calendar Sync is another notable feature. It ensures all your meetings, calls, and events (like a webinar, for example) are synced between your email and Salesforce, providing frictionless scheduling and improved time management.
Cirrus Insight also offers contextual Salesforce insights right in the inbox. With this feature, you can view and update Salesforce records without leaving your email, making for a more efficient workflow.
Our two cents
Indeed, the automatic sync feature is a significant productivity booster. We appreciate the ease of accessing Salesforce data right from the inbox. This will consistently shave off minutes from your workflow, leading to improved time efficiency.
Now, we have to stress that there’s a bit of a learning curve, as this app is for intermediate to advanced users of the Marketing Cloud, and other Salesforce editions. The good news is that the app is well-documented, so you shouldn’t struggle to figure out the ropes.
Ebsta
Ebsta is another noteworthy app for email synchronization, designed to empower Salesforce users with greater control over their email management. Its core strength lies in the ability to sync and surface relevant Salesforce data directly in your inbox.
Key features
Comprehensive email synchronization is Ebsta’s strong suit. The app ensures that all your email conversations, events, and contacts are automatically synced with Salesforce. It also features a real-time activity tracking capability, enabling users to see who is engaging with their emails right away.
Another standout feature is Ebsta’s cross-platform compatibility. Whether you’re using Gmail, Outlook, or another email client, Ebsta allows you to access crucial Salesforce data without leaving your inbox.
Finally, Ebsta’s calendar synchronization provides the easy scheduling of meetings and events, which are then automatically updated in Salesforce. So, there’s less chance you’ll miss an important interaction.
Our two cents
Again, we like Ebsta’s robust synchronization features, which can notably improve your workflow. The integration with various email clients is seamless, and real-time activity tracking can be a game-changer, particularly for your sales team.
For instance, let’s imagine the interaction happens at an odd hour and your sales rep is out of the office. The rep could get a real-time notification on Salesforce Mobile, and act on it immediately.
Lastly, we observed less of a learning curve compared to Cirrus Insight. But this is a highly subjective parameter, so take it with a grain of salt.
Salesforce Apps for Email Analytics
When it comes to email infrastructure within Salesforce, having insightful analytics is indispensable. It allows for data-driven decisions, ensuring your communication strategy is aligned with your audience’s needs. Let’s explore one of the leading apps for email analytics.
Full Circle Insights
Full Circle Insights is an app designed to offer robust email analytics within the Salesforce CRM. It aims to bridge the gap between data and insights, making it easier to understand your email engagement.
Key features
Full Circle Insights brings several key features to the table.
- Response Management – designed to provide a detailed understanding of your email performance, tracking engagement metrics such as opens, clicks, and conversions directly within Salesforce.
- Campaign Influence – lets you see the direct and indirect influence of your emails on sales opportunities, providing insights into the effectiveness of your email strategy.
- Funnel Metrics – gives a comprehensive view of your sales funnel, helping you understand how emails contribute at each stage of the customer journey.
Our two cents
Full Circle Insights provides a depth of analytics that could satisfy even the most demanding users. The Response Management feature, in particular, offers great granularity and accuracy. We also appreciate the sales funnel insights, which can be quite a helper in optimizing your email strategy.
So, to no surprise, this Salesforce integration requires a certain level of expertise to fully exploit its capabilities. But once mastered, its potential to transform email strategy and inform business processes is undeniable.
On that note, we should stress that this is an enterprise-level app, which is reflected in its pricing.
Salesforce Apps for Feedback and User Experience Management
In the Salesforce landscape, receiving and managing customer feedback is crucial. It can inform and drive improvements to product features, services, and user experience.
Here are two apps designed to simplify feedback collection and enhance user experience.
Zonka Feedback
Zonka Feedback is a comprehensive tool for capturing and analyzing feedback within Salesforce Lightning. Its primary objective is to help businesses measure customer sentiment and improve their overall experience.
Key features
Zonka offers real-time feedback capture, allowing you to respond quickly to customer needs. It supports various feedback channels, including email, SMS, and on-site feedback, giving your customers the flexibility to interact through their preferred channels.
With its rich analytics, you can easily understand customer sentiment, identify trends, and track improvement over time. The app give you the option to set up instant notifications for specific feedback. In turn, you get to act immediately, when required.
Our two cents
The most useful Zonka features are multi-channel feedback collection and in-depth analytics. Plus, real-time feedback capture can have a significant impact on quick problem resolution, particularly for customer success and customer relationship teams.
If we’re really nitpicky (which we aren’t), Zonka might benefit from more customization options. But overall, it’s among the best feedback apps, suitable for small businesses and enterprises alike.
Survicate
Survicate is a survey tool that allows you to collect continuous customer feedback via email, web, in-product, and mobile apps. It offers over 300 ready-to-use survey templates, including NPS, CSAT, and CES, making survey creation a breeze.
Key features
Integrating Salesforce and Survicate is a one-click, code-free process – there’s no need for complex technical configurations.
With Survicate, you can seamlessly embed surveys directly into Salesforce emails, enhancing your feedback collection process and enriching customer interactions. Users can conveniently share valuable insights without having to visit external platforms.
As data between the two tools is synced in real time, survey responses are immediately accessible in Salesforce, which makes it easy to take prompt actions based on customer feedback.
Our two cents
We like that Survicate captures every response, even if a user didn’t fill in every field, meaning you won’t lose any data.
The transfer of contact attributes between Salesforce and Survicate is very easy indeed, and it helps you quickly filter survey insights and trigger workflows based on responses.
Jotform
Jotform Salesforce Forms is a robust solution for creating and managing forms within the Salesforce ecosystem. It’s designed to streamline the sales process by automating form data synchronization with your Salesforce account.
Key Features
The platform offers an intuitive form builder, enabling the creation of custom forms that seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. It’s great that you can start with ready-made templates and customize them fast. Plus, the forms are optimized for iOS and Android users.
Also, the feature that allows sharing prefilled forms with customers is a standout because it simplifies the form-filling process a lot. And the automatic data sync with Salesforce CRM ensures that the data flow into your database is effortless.
Additionally, Jotform offers an electronic signature collection through Jotform Sign. It can be a godsend for sales teams looking to expedite their deal closures.
Our Two Cents
The ease of form creation and customization is a highlight indeed. And the same goes for automatic sync and prefilled forms. The reporting and analytics are adequate, but there’s room for more advanced analytical tools. Nonetheless, Jotform’s balance of simplicity and functionality makes it a great tool for Salesforce users.
Salesforce Apps for Email Security and Compliance
In the realm of Salesforce and the Appexchange apps, security and compliance are paramount. Keeping sensitive data safe and adhering to industry regulations can make a significant difference to your business’s credibility and trustworthiness. Here are the key apps that excel in these aspects.
OwnBackup
OwnBackup is a comprehensive solution designed to protect your Salesforce data, including emails. It offers a suite of tools to ensure your email data remains secure and compliant with industry standards.
Key features
At the core of OwnBackup is a robust backup and restore functionality. It automatically backs up data from the CRM platform, including emails, attachments, and metadata. In the event of data loss, you can restore custom objects or entire orgs without too much hassle.
The app also offers a comprehensive suite of compliance tools. With features like audit trails and encrypted backups, OwnBackup helps you meet compliance standards such as GDPR and HIPAA.
Finally, its Sandbox Seeding feature is a standout, letting you easily create and manage test data environments without compromising security or compliance. If you’re a SaaS, this feature will allow for more stable workflows, helping you remove preventable errors from production.
Our two cents
OwnBackup has backup-and-restore capabilities that can further streamline project management and completion. Also, its comprehensive compliance features can give you the peace of mind that both your static and in-transit data remain intact.
Admittedly, the user interface could be a bit more intuitive. However, for such a robust security and compliance solution, it’s not a deal breaker by any means.
Cloud Compliance
Cloud Compliance is a purpose-built app for Salesforce that provides an efficient solution for data privacy and compliance management.
Basically, the app makes it simpler for you to meet complex regulatory requirements while ensuring the integrity of your email data.
Key features
There’s a comprehensive suite of tools that help manage personal data in Salesforce. And here’s a quick scoop of what you might find most useful.
- Data Discovery and Classification – allows you to locate and categorize personal data, aiding in GDPR and CCPA compliance.
- Data Retention and Deletion – enables you to set and automate data retention policies, ensuring unnecessary data doesn’t linger and contribute to compliance risks.
- Privacy Portal – allows data subjects to access and manage their data rights requests, further enhancing your compliance stance.
Our two cents
Cloud Compliance is a Salesforce native app, so there’s almost no learning curve, and you get the benefit of native integration. In plain English, if you understand Salesforce, you shouldn’t struggle with Cloud Compliance at all.
To that, the efficiency and completeness of the compliance features are hard to rival.
For instance, Data Discovery and Classification, along with automated Data Retention, are great aids in meeting GDPR and CCPA requirements.
The Role of Mailtrap in the Salesforce Ecosystem
In the Salesforce ecosystem, various apps bolster different aspects of email management.
Mailtrap, however, holds a distinct and multifaceted role in this arena.
It’s an email delivery platform for businesses and individuals that offers robust features to test, send, and control emails in one place.
Overview of Mailtrap
As indicated, Mailtrap’s functionality extends beyond the bounds of testing, but first things first.
Mailtrap Testing adds an email sandbox to your Salesforce toolbox to help developers test and debug emails without the risk of email templates from staging ever reaching your recipients.
How?
It goes like this:
- We give you a fake SMTP server.
- The server captures outgoing test emails.
- We analyze content for spam and validate HTML/CSS.
- The developers view errors, debug, then proceed to send highly-deliverable emails
The sending part is, of course, covered by Mailtrap Email Sending functionality via API or SMTP. It’s designed for transactional and bulk emails. Plus, there are five SDKs to integrate Mailtrap with your app quicker.
On top of that, Mailtrap provides color-coded, user-friendly analytics, email templates, and webhooks.
How does it differ from the aforementioned apps?
While other Salesforce apps focus on aspects such as synchronization, analytics, feedback, user experience, and security, Mailtrap brings a unique combination of pre-production email testing and robust email sending and analytics capabilities.
Also, there’s a technical difference. Unlike other apps in this article, Mailtrap integrates with Salesforce via Salesforce’s Email Relay feature. If you want to learn more about this, check our “How to Set up Salesforce Email Relay” blog post.
Note: Soon, you’ll be able to integrate Mailtrap Email Testing to Lightning Experience via AppExchange.
What added value does it bring to Salesforce users?
We’re at liberty to stress that Mailtrap carves out a special niche in the Salesforce ecosystem. The key highlight is its ability to catch emails from the staging environment and also manage email production operations with just-in-time delivery.
For Salesforce users, Mailtrap provides a unique blend of utility and control over their emails. As indicated, with Mailtrap email sandbox for testing, you can prevent unintended emails from reaching customers during the development phase.
Then, Mailtrap Email Sending allows you to send emails fast and reliably. It also offers comprehensive analytics, email templates, and webhooks. So you can have almost instant access to deliverability events and email data (assuming you use webhooks). And consequently, gain better control over your email infrastructure.
All this results in more effective communication with existing customers, higher user adoption, and better customer support; leading to improved customer experience.
And lastly, we’d need to point out that Mailtrap integrates with Salesforce using the Email Relays functionality, allowing for a seamless transition of data and operations between the two platforms.
What trends to look for with Salesforce apps?
As the Salesforce ecosystem continues to adapt and expand, there are several trends worth keeping an eye on in relation to email infrastructure.
- Data management and security
With the growing emphasis on data privacy and regulations, we can expect to see even more sophisticated features dedicated to email security and compliance. This includes more advanced encryption methodologies, AI-powered anomaly detection, and improved auditing capabilities.
For instance, Mailtrap is already using a state-of-the-art AI model for the following.
- Filter and block spammers and protect our IPs
- Run domain authentication and trustworthiness
- Integrations galore
Integration is the key! Expect to see more Salesforce apps offering seamless integration with other platforms and tools. This trend is driven by the need for interconnected tools that provide users with like an all-in-one, streamlined workflow.
- Your users/customers are front-center
Undoubtedly, user experience will remain a primary focus. With an increasing demand for personalized customer experiences, email management tools will likely continue to evolve to allow for more personalized and interactive email templates and designs.
Bonus Tip:
Salesforce Labs, which we haven’t covered in this article, also offers plenty of free apps and integrations, some of which are designed as mobile apps. For example, we like the Trail Tracker by Trailhead a lot, even though it’s not directly related to email infrastructure. But if you have a team that just migrated to Salesforce, it could really flatten the learning curve.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
When all’s said and done, Salesforce apps related to email infrastructure are integral components of an effective Salesforce strategy.
Whether it’s for email synchronization, analytics, user experience management, security, compliance, or whatever you need; these apps provide a measurable value by enhancing efficiency and ensuring the integrity of your email operations.
In this ever-evolving landscape, Mailtrap stands out with its unique combination of robust email testing and sending functionalities, making it an invaluable tool for any business using Salesforce.
