Emails are an integral part of any communication system, and CRM is perhaps the most important system which relies on email. Taking this into account, we’ve decided to focus on making emails into and out of Jetpack CRM simple, reliable, device-friendly, and managed.
This means that rather than just relying on whatever means your WordPress install has of sending emails, we needed to build a ‘Mail Delivery manager’. Next, we realised that it was super important that every email sent out of the CRM be fully customisable. That lead to us writing a fresh ‘Mail Template manager. Both of these features were released in v.2.80 and are now defaults for outbound emails from Jetpack CRM.
While this may all seem like ‘more setup’, it’s pretty legit straight out of the box and will still send out any system email cleanly.
… but what it allows is:
Reliable, Scalable, Email Delivery
It’s all well and good your server sends out four weekly emails to a few clients. This usually works okay. But if any of these apply, email delivery becomes a big challenge:
- Shared hosting woes (other people on your server might get your emails in the not-allowed list by spamming or other nefarious activity)
- Sending out large quantities/unlimited emails – anyone trying to do this from a dedicated server will know this doesn’t work well. Most go undelivered; often, your server gets blocked/banned (and if it’s a common provider like outlook.com or gmail.com – all of your customers on that email provider WON’T be getting your emails!)
And our Mail Delivery Manager begins to solve this…
Mail Delivery Manager:
From v2.80 of Jetpack CRM, you can now manually manage your mail delivery options. In a nutshell, you can add multiple ‘FROM’ email addresses to send out mail from your CRM.
Currently, you can add any email address with an SMTP account and send emails from that address.
This has the following benefits:
- Emails come from an actual mail provider, not a generic server (more likely to skip spam)
- Emails can go through large-scale delivery machines like Amazon’s SES, SendGrid, or MailGun, (far improved deliverability & scale)
- If you use a mailbox, you can see all of the sent emails in your ‘sent’ folder (if desired)
- Emails can come from different email addresses depending on what they’re for, e.g. Invoice notifications can come from ‘accounts@yourdomain.com’, whereas simple message emails can come from ‘support@yourdomain.com’.
- Mail Campaigns v2.0 Ready – In Mail Campaigns V2, your mail can come from any validated SMTP source. This manager seamlessly integrates with MC2.
Please note: from the Jetpack CRM mailing system, you can only send emails to Contacts’ email addresses.
Read the guide on setting up Mail Delivery methods
Mail Templates:
After ensuring that your mail GETS to your clients, the next thing to deal with is to ensure the mail looks great every single send. Enter Mail Templates.
In earlier versions of Jetpack CRM, you could modify some of the system email templates, but before v2.80 you couldn’t change them all, and the process was slow and ugly. Mike’s fixed all that, and you can now effortlessly modify all outbound system emails via the Mail Template Manager:
This is a centralised repository for templates for all system emails, such as:
- Quote Notification (to client)
- Invoice Notification (to client)
- Quote Accepted Notification (to your back office)
- Task/Schedule/Event Notifications (participants)
Read guides on editing your mail templates here
Gmail OAuth Connection for Mail Delivery Method
From version 5.2.0 it’s possible to connect your Gmail account with CRM for mail delivery. We have put together a step-by-step guide to follow to set it up. You can find it on this dedicated Gmail OAuth Connection documentation page.