We keep hearing about the death of email – social media was going to kill email, spam was going to kill email, etc, etc. if you search Google for “email death”, you will find hundreds of articles predicting and espousing the death of email. As a side note, this even goes back 10 years: The Death of EMail by John Dvorak.
And still EMail continues to thrive, especially in business. The Radicati Group, in Email Statistics Report, 2013-2017 says that email accounts will grow by 1 Billion over the next four years and that “Email remains the go-to form of communication in the Business world.”
So, back to our headline. One of the most frustrating things about marketing automation is the learning curve. These systems tend to be complicated and used by the marketing gurus. But wouldn’t it be great to allow more people access to the data in these systems? The answer is yes. Sales people want to and should participate along with customer service and more.
As discussed, EMail is used by everyone in the company, so why not let people access marketing and sales information from the familiar EMail interface?
Cirrus Insights, a small tech startup in California has taken on the task of making access easier by integrating these systems with GMail. Cirrus starts by integrating Salesforce into GMail. So while you are looking at an email from a client or prospect, Cirrus Insights pops up on the right of your screen to show you information about that person from your Salesforce.com data. You can also reply in Gmail and have that reply attached to Salesforce so others can see all the interactions with customers. Here is a video explaining this integration: http://youtu.be/H2izCeDWAIQ 
Now Cirrus has used its platform to integrate other systems into GMail, including Eloqua, Marketo, and more. Say you are looking at an email from a prospective customer and you want to know their lead score according to Marketo. Cirrus Insights shows you that when you open the email. You say that your company uses Eloqua instead. Cirrus Insight says no problem – they pull information in from Eloqua as well. Take a look at this video for more information: http://youtu.be/pgDHHdfd4kc
Maybe this all sounds complicated – integrating all theses systems together in a big spider web. But Cirrus has taken a simpler approach. First, you integrate Eloqua with Salesforce.com. The Salesforce.com Marketplace makes this easier. Once you have tied those two together, Cirrus Insights can now show you the Eloqua data alongside the Salesforce.com data in the context of GMail. Now all of your authorized GMail users have easy access to all of this data.
For more about Cirrus see their website: cirrusinsight.com
I tried a couple of 3rd party apps and this one is the best I’ve found – ContactMonkey (http://www.contactmonkey.com/salesforce-gmail-integration). Really easy to track open emails, stats and the best is the ability to send templates right from gmail makes following up easy!