If you want to have your business grow fast and steady, you definitely need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for tracking the

communication process with your prospects and customers.

A CRM will help you, for example, to make smart segmentations, manage different marketing campaigns according to different customers segments,

track conversions metrics

CRM software is typically used in every enterprise. However, many products scale to a business of any size. Since email is still one of the primary forms of contact, if you’re using Gmail you might already have your CRM tool right in

front you.. you just need some tweaks.

Some tools are native Gmail. Then there are others we’ll talk about which are

third party software.

Here is a little summary of what we’re going to see in this article, you can use

this index to skip directly to the pro feature if you already know your onions

1. Native Gmail features: Contacts, Groups, Canned emails

2. Third party tools: Rapportive, Bommerang, Unroll

3. Segmentation: From Facebook Lead ads to Gmail labels (PRO)

Contacts

Gmail has a very useful but often unused

contacts section. You can access it by clicking

on the dropdown menu just over the

compose button on the left.

Native gmail features

The contact database automatically stores information on anyone you

correspond with and you can add more data to it as well. Clicking on the add

button you can add info like birthday date, relationship status, or just a

custom field according to your business needs.

Groups

Another interesting feature here is the groups’ one. You can put every

contact in an appropriate group, for example here I’m choosing to assign

this one to “New leads”.

Having everything well

organized this way will help

you saving time and working

better later on. Like for creating mail campaigns to these groups.

Canned responses

One of my loved ones, an incredible time saver hided in the Gmail Labs

features. But what are we talking about?

Basically email templates

that will then be always at

just a few clicks away for

fast responses. You just

need to activate it. Go to

your settings page:

Then select the “Lab”

tab, find in the list

“Canned emails”,

enable it and then

click save at the

bottom of the page.

Here you go, now compose a new message, click on the little arrow in the

bottom right and you’ll find the new Canned responses option. Select “New

canned response” and you’ll save the email you just wrote as a template.

The next time you’ll have to answer to an email in a similar way come back

here and you’ll have just to click on your saved template to make it appear

inside your mail body. Fast and easy!

Rapportive

This is an amazing tool everyone using Gmail for business should have. It’s

a free add-on from LinkedIn that automatically adds a window inside Gmail

with more information about the person you’re interacting with. As you can

see in the picture down here I’m writing to Stefan, our CEO at LeadsBridge,

and Rapportive is showing me social media data about him.

3rd party tools

Boomerang

Boomerang is another very handful tool for Gmail to get more control over

our emails. We can get a receipt when our emails are opened and know if

the links inside them have been clicked. Then Boomerang allows to select

as you send or reply to an email an action based on that email.

For starters you can choose to send it later, which might come handy for

example if you are a night owl and you feel a little embarrassed to send out

important emails at 2 am. Another cool feature is about follow ups. If you

send an email to someone with a request or a suggestion, you can infact

ask Boomerang to return that to you if nobody response within x amount

of time. So If nobody answers for let’s say one week, after that time

Boomerang will send it back to your Inbox so you can see it as a reminder

and take action.

In a similar way you can

archive an email you don’t

have time to deal with

right away and tell

Boomerang to get it back

in your Inbox a set

amount of time later.

Unroll

One last suggestion to keep the inbox clear.

We all arrive at a certain point when it becomes impossible to stay up to

date with all the newsletter we subscribed to over time. Many of them are

probably at this point just useful to keep that unread count going always

up. Here comes in our helpUnroll.me

This service scans your inbox for all the newsletters and then you can

choose all those you want to keep, to unsubscribe in just a click, or to add to

a digest email called the Rollup.

Let’s create a scenario just to see how to set up all the process: you’re

targeting people who might be interested in buying a new fancy car, so you

might want to differentiate the new leads according to the car they’re

interested in.

Everything starts on Facebook with the Lead ad creation form. You choose

to add a question, which will be shown as a drop-down menu asking the

user to make a choice between 4 cars: Tesla, Ferrari, Lamborghini or

Porsche. Pretty fancy huh?

When you’re done with the ad

creation, you can log into

LeadsBridge app and start setting

up the second step of the process:

the bridge from Facebook to Gmail.

From the dashboard choose the Add integration button.

In the next screen select as provider “Inbox Notifier (Email)”. Then set a name for your new integration and personalize the email fields if you need to.

Click save and then go to the LeadAds section and create a new one. When you arrive at the integrations tab from the drop-down menu, you’ll be able to choose the integration you just created.

Finish the steps to create the LeadAds bridge inside LeadsBridge. Now every

time someone fills your form on Facebook, an email will be sent in real time

to your inbox. Now you are ready for the final chapter: Gmail. Here we’ll have

to setup filters. Go to your Settings page in Gmail and select the “Filters and

blocked addresses” tab, then click on create the new filter.

At this point, you’ll have to fill the form with the info that will allow the filter to recognize the email coming through the bridge from the Facebook lead ad.

So we just need to set the same settings we have chosen in the Inbox Notifier integration inside LeadsBridge: the “from” address and the subject.

In the “has the words” field put the answer you are segmenting with for this filter. Then you’ll be able to assign it to a different label according to the answer the user gave to the question about, in our scenario, the car he desires.

Now you have to choose the action you want to take. In our case, we want to add a label and have all the leads who are interested in a new Tesla car well organized in one single place inside our Gmail account.

How can we do this? Click on the “Apply the label option”, create the label you need and select it. In the next slide, for example, I’ve created a “Fancy cars leads” label and nested the different types of cars. Create the filter and you’re done! A little bonus tip: do you see in the image down here the canned response option? As we mentioned above talking about this cool Gmail lab feature you can select it as well to send an automatic response to people clicking on your Facebook lead ads.

Welcome emails are very important, and people expect to receive one right away when subscribing to something.

You can also put some nice personalization here since you know how this lead answered to the question you asked!

Here is your first filter already in action!

And finally the result:

Now you have all the leads coming from your Facebook campaign well organized, automatically, inside Gmail.

Time to sell those fancy cars!

Michele Serrazanetti - Click Here to read the full post