My company currently uses an outside email messaging system (Mandrill by Mailchimp) to send emails, both from our API and sales rep.
When integrating HubSpot does it make sense to set up an event series that would push to our API and trigger mandrill emails or to integrate Gmail instead?
Thanks for your prompt reply. I have a few more quick questions on this subject I’m hoping you can answer:
– Is either transactional emails or a Gmail integration required to send emails from HubSpot CRM? Would it be possible to hook up an event sequence in the CRM that can communicate with an outside API to send an email and then record that email and its results in HubSpot?
– How critical is the email dashboard to to the whole HubSpot CRM experience?
– How would we go about integrating Mandrill into our HubSpot CRM? With the event sequences I described above? Another way?
Neither integration is required to send emails from inside the CRM. The Transactional email add-on is used to send emails that would be triggered or generated from some other system, but send the emails through HubSpot’s email platform. The Gmail integration makes it easier to track and log emails in HubSpot when you’re sending emails using Gmail. Neither is a requirement for sending emails from inside the CRM app in HubSpot.
The Email and Sales dashboards are going to be the best way to see the overview of how well your emails are doing, including the number of emails being sent, and how many of those emails are being delivered, opened, or unsubscribed from. http://academy.hubspot.com/projects/customer-projects-sales-force-productivity
The email dashboard allows for easy access of all of email tools such as creating a new email, changing settings, and viewing the performance of an email.
There would not be a way to create and trigger an email from inside HubSpot, but have it sent through Mandrill, as we don’t have a way to get the contents of the email through the API.
If you’re currently sending emails manually through an API, you may want to take a look at our Transactional Email add-on. That add-on includes the SMTP and Single Send APIs which let would let you programmatically send emails.
Learn more about HubSpots transactional email service that delivers highly relevant messages to your customers inbox.
For the emails from your sales reps, if you’re already using Gmail you can use the HubSpot Sales integration to integrate your Gmail inbox with HubSpot. There are more details about that integration here:
When using a mail client that does not support the Sales email extension, simply add [yourHubID]@bcc.hubspot.com to the BCC field of an outgoing email.