Today we're very excited to announce a one-of-a-kind integration between our award-winning Zoho CRM service and Zoho Mail (and other e-mail platforms too).

The problem our customers were facing was clear: they manage their customer relationships with Zoho CRM, yet most of their customer communications happen via e-mail. Our goal was to not only bring both of these together, but to do so in an elegant and easy-to-setup and easy-to-use way. We've been working hard on this, and we're very proud of the result.

Full-fledged e-mail within Zoho CRM

One of the first things that people will notice is the new "Emails" tab in Zoho CRM. This gives you instant, un-restricted access to all of your mails within Zoho Mail. Customers can now easily switch between their mail and their CRM from within the same window/tab in their browser. And of course - there's no need to sign-in again, Zoho's single sign-on takes care of that in the backend.

E-mail Composing/Reading within the CRM Contacts Tab

Of course you don't need to go to your e-mail client, or the Zoho CRM Email tab to interact with customers and contacts via e-mail. Within the Contacts tab, we have enable both mail read and compose, so all your e-mail communications are truly just one click away.

BCC: No one

One of the things we really like about the Zoho CRM and Zoho Mail integration is that it requires users to do nothing. Really. Some inferior crm + mail solutions require users to CC:/BCC: some special e-mail address. Not us. Everything is taken care of on the background. E-mails will be logged within the respective contacts regardless if they were sent from the CRM Contacts Tab, the CRM Emails tab, directly on Zoho Mail, or even while using another mail client to send e-mail with Zoho Mail.

E-mails that respect hierarchy

Another cool thing about the integration with Zoho Mail is that the same permissions structure that applies to Accounts/Contacts will apply to e-mails to/from those contacts. So for example, when Steve Salesman, maintains an e-mail communication with Charles Customer, Steve's manager will be able to refer to those e-mail communications.


Create CRM contacts and to-dos directly in Zoho Mail

Some customer interactions begin through e-mail. At any point, you can create a CRM contact directly from your Zoho Mail interface. You just need to choose 'Add to CRM' from the 'More Options' drop-down in Z Mail. Not only that - but after creating the contact you can also immediately add a task (for example, to follow-up with the contact or send a document). And of course, to keep the data clean, Zoho Mail will advice you if that particular contact already exists.

Connect to other e-mail systems

And of course, the last thing we'd want is to force customer to use Zoho Mail to take advantage of this great new functionality. So no, you don't need to host your e-mail with Zoho if you don't want. If you are happily e-mailing your customers from your Gmail account, you can continue to do that. you just need to enable POP in your e-mail service/server so Zoho Mail can connect to those e-mails. We know some people will prefer a method other than POP, and we're working on that as well.

And here's a short video that Victor on our team prepared:

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An open invitation to Zwitch

Today we're also announcing the Zwitch to Zoho program. It's our way to make life easier for those customers wanting to migrate out of Salesforce.com's and into Zoho's affordable-yet-fully-featured CRM service. Among other things, it includes:

• Free, no-obligation assessment with a Zoho CRM specialist
• Free data migration services
• Free trial periods, and free service for up to 6 months, depending on the time left on the Salesforce contract

If you're a Salesforce customer who wants a powerful, award-winning CRM product, and save some money at the same time, just visit www.zoho.com/crm/zwitch.html to get started.

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The CRM+Mail integration we have done here highlights the power of what we call contextual integration. It means that what matters is the information, not what 'product' you use to access it. The right information follows you, regardless what application you happen to be using at the time. It is possible only because of the tight integration between these two services - something that would be hard to achieve by two separate companies, even when they really really want to work together.

Finally, some users may have noticed that typically we introduce some new functionality without announcing it (sometimes even whole new products!). That gives us a chance to iron out any final kinks. In this particular case, we were pleasantly surprised by the number of users who went on to purchase this key feature (as low as $3 per user/month) before we even announced, explained it, or made it official. So thanks for your warm welcome before it even arrived. Also, congratulations to the Office 2.0 Review blog - they even discovered and blogged about it, prior to us announcing it.


Rodrigo