A Salesforce State of the Connected Consumer report shows that email is the most used and preferred communication channel for consumers and businesses worldwide. Even as consumers increasingly adopt instant messaging to communicate with their friends and families on social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and others, email reigns supreme when businesses engage with customers.
More people use email today than ever before. In fact, the number of email users worldwide grew to approximately 4 billion in 2020 and shows no signs of slowing. By 2024, experts expect that number to increase to more than 4.5 billion, an annual growth rate of 3%, and the email marketing industry alone will be worth $22.16 billion.
If your platform doesn’t offer an easy way for users to communicate via email, you’re already behind. The time for CRM email integration is now, and the simplest and most cost-effective way to do this is by using email APIs.
Unlike traditional email marketing, communication via a CRM typically focuses on an individual versus mass messaging to an extensive mailing list. In the current age of hyper-targeting, consumers have high expectations that businesses know who they are and account for their recent interactions. Personalization increases email open rates by more than 25% and is an extremely powerful tool for CRM users who are communicating daily with clientele.
While individualized communication is beneficial to customers and prospects, manually sending these emails is time-consuming and error-prone for CRM users. Doing so at scale to thousands of people is nearly impossible without significant help from a developer.
By using an email API, business leaders can enable sales representatives and marketing teams to deliver personalized 1:1 email exchanges in a matter of days.
“We wanted to help sales users be able to do intelligent outreach at scale, so they could book more meetings all via the Crunchbase interface. Adding bi-directional email sync provides our users with a way to increase their productivity within the Crunchbase platform.”
Monika Abraham, Product Operations Manager at Crunchbase.
Data — and the technology used to glean insights from it — is one of the most important factors in creating better experiences. Connecting your users’ inboxes to your CRM opens up a whole new world of access to communications data that users can leverage to increase engagement with their prospects.
The Nylas Email API enables real-time analytics such as open rates, link clicks, and replies, providing users with a more holistic picture of their customers. Engagement data can help empowers users to:
Building native email solutions in your CRM from scratch is an immense undertaking, and integrating with multiple service providers is even more complex. It can take thousands of development hours, burn millions of dollars, and cause unnecessary friction that can slow your time-to-market and increase business risk.
“Our biggest pain point was email connectors. We were building them ourselves, and they would break all the time. It took quite a bit of effort to get these systems to be mature, and they still weren’t perfect. This slowed us down and created a backlog of bugs that our team kept having to address and didn’t contribute to the core competencies of our product.”
Isaac Nassimi, Chief Product Officer at Cience
Every email service provider (ESP), from Gmail to Microsoft 365, has a separate schema. The more providers you want to work with, the more complex the process becomes — especially from a development and engineering standpoint.
CRM email integration using Nylas’ Email API helps you deliver on your product roadmap while using minimal engineering, product, and design resources. In addition to the building phase, the Nylas Email API reduces reliance on engineers for ongoing maintenance and reliability, especially as you scale. The ability to simply set it and forget it unblocks your developers so they can focus on other core CRM competencies.
“There was no reason to try and reinvent the wheel; Nylas was already a proven solution. Nylas has put a lot of time and effort into its solution, which gave us comfort in having that level of security. Trying to build the email API ourselves would’ve involved much more time and cost – and we didn’t have the luxury of time. Working with Nylas gave us the confidence to move forward quickly, our speed to market was at a minimum two months faster.”
Divya Prashanth, CEO, and Co-Founder of MySocialPulse.
Not only will your developers thank you when opting for a pre-built email API, but your security teams can mitigate the risk of threats with compliance-driven assurance from a trusted third party. Nylas adheres to SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA | HITECH, and FINRA regulations and undergoes rigorous external audits and penetration tests.
Ensuring data security, reducing costs, and streamlining productivity are crucial to establishing a CRM that serves the collective needs of your users. Want to understand more about building CRM integrations with communications APIs? Download our guide, How to Build a highly-engaging CRM, and start rolling out features to drive user adoption and market differentiation now.
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Erin is a content marketing professional at Nylas, where she creates digital assets that connect the organization to individuals. Before Nylas, she spent eight years working in public relations specializing in corporate communications strategy, B2B/B2C writing and editing, executive thought leadership, and other storytelling. In her free time, she enjoys volleyball, karaoke, and baking.
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