Insightly CRM Onboarding Part 4: Project Management & Email
Project Management & Email
At the heart of every successful business are smart, repeatable processes. Insightly’s opportunities are specifically designed to help you manage your sales processes. But what happens after you close the deal? To help make sure all of your customers are taken care of, Insightly has projects. But before we take a look at how projects work, let’s define what project means.
What are projects?
A Project is an object used to track work projects that need to be completed. You can track the progress of your projects through the status. You can also track the different stages of a project through a pipeline or milestones.
Note: You can use either pipelines or milestones for a project, but not both.
If your process for completing a project is generally linear and you’re doing the same thing every time, we suggest using a pipeline for your project similar to the way you may have used an opportunity pipeline.
However, if your process for completing a project needs to be more flexible and you’re doing different things for each of your clients, we suggest using milestones. You can attach due dates and group your tasks and create new milestones as needed.
Back in the initial setup guide, we showed you how to link your email account to Insightly so you could send emails without leaving your CRM. Now we’ll show what you can do with email in Insightly.
Did you know you have four different options for sending email in Insightly? Check out the video below to learn about them.
Email Templates
Send out emails quicker and with more consistency by using pre-populated email templates. When you create an email template, it’s available to all the users on your Insightly account.
Email templates can be sorted into objects and categories to help you organize and group them.
Additionally, templates can be used with Workflow Automation, which can send an email for you when it’s triggered by a change on a record.
After the template is saved, all of your Insightly users will be able to select it from the categorized template list when composing new messages.
You can use your Insightly mailbox address to save emails as well. Insightly goes a step further than your regular email by scanning and linking that email to existing records in your CRM.
How Insightly links your messages
When you save an email to your Insightly mailbox, the system scans for email addresses and domains so it can automatically link the message to matching contacts and organizations. If Insightly does not find matching records, it will create the contacts and organizations for you.
The linking only supports emails with headers in English, so they must read “From,” “To,” “CC,” and “BCC.” If your email program is set to a different language, Insightly may not be able to recognize the proper fields and complete the links.
Using To and CC fields have very different results when the email is received by Insightly. BCC is another option, but isn’t recommended.
Let’s look at how each of these work:
Use the To field to forward received messages
When you receive an email that you would like to save to Insightly, forward it to Insightly by entering your mailbox address in the To field.
When Insightly receives the message, the system will look through the first 10 lines of the email body for email addresses and domains in the original message header. (It will not link the email to other addresses in the To, CC, or BCC fields.)
Insightly expects the first few lines of the email body to contain the original email headers and look something like the text below:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Lorraine Laughlin <lol@someemail.inn>
Date: Tue, Apr 8, 2018 at 11:27 AM
Subject: Important update!
To: Omar Gibbons <omg@someemail.inn>
If you are sending an email to someone and incorrectly include the Insightly mailbox address in the To field, Insightly will not find matching email addresses in the first few lines of the body and will only link the email to the user of the Insightly email address in the From field.
Use the CC field when sending messages
When sending an email that you would like to copy to Insightly, enter your mailbox address in the CC field. This will prompt the system to look through the To field when the message is received and find matching addresses.
Insightly can also scan the CC field for other addresses, if you have that setting enabled. See the Email Settings section for more information.
If you use a mailbox address for an Insightly opportunity or project in the CC field, Insightly will link it to that record as well as the related contacts and organization. Because of this, either use your personal mailbox address or the opportunity or project mailbox address. Do not use both.
Use the BCC field when sending messages… maybe
If you put your mailbox address in the BCC field of an outgoing message, Insightly may or may not be able to match it to the correct user; if we can, it works the same way as if you had used the CC field. This will depend on your email provider and email application. You may want to review our article regarding the use of the BCC field for more details.
Gmail Add-On & Outlook Sidebar
Insightly has built additional tools for Microsoft and Gmail users to increase efficiency and productivity. You can save emails easily and have the ability to use your emails templates directly from the gadget.
If you’re using Outlook, we suggest installing the Insightly Sidebar for Outlook.
Gmail user? No problem! You can install the Insightly Add-on for Gmail.
That’s it for this section. Part five will teach you about Permissions and Workflow Automation. Click here to skip ahead.