Emails are one of the most common - and important - ways you communicate with your customers and prospects. You individually connect your own work email account with Planhat, and your emails will be synced to Planhat.

Each email can be associated with one Company (an organization that's a customer or prospect - see "Definitions" box below) in Planhat. In the vast majority of cases, this is a very straightforward process - e.g. if you email phil@apple.com, you'd typically expect that email to be mapped to your Company "Apple".

But occasionally, the situation is slightly more complicated:

In cases such as these, the email will be assessed automatically, and either one of the possible Companies will be chosen, or the email will go to the Unassigned folder (where you can manually assign it to a Company).

In this article, we'll explain the matching process. It's a combination of:

We'll also show you how to assign emails via the Unassigned folder.

When an email is synced into Planhat, we calculate a score for each Company it could potentially be linked to, to evaluate its relevance. These scores are then used in combination with the "email matching mode" (discussed later in this article) to either assign the email to one of those Companies, or send it to the Unassigned folder.

The actual calculation is built into Planhat, but one of the factors it considers is the "Primary" field on the End User model (discussed later in this article), which you can activate/deactivate on End User records, thus influencing the score each Company gets.

This is the calculation logic applied to each email, showing the points awarded to determine the relevance score for each Company (remembering the model definitions in the Introduction):

This feature applies automatically - you do not need to actively choose to use it.

It's really beneficial built-in functionality, as it works out which Company (if any) to link the email to.

There's nothing you need to directly do here - the score is calculated for each Company automatically for each email.

You can influence the score, however, via the Primary field, which we discuss next in this article!

The Primary field, which you may also hear referred to as the "Primary flag", is a system (i.e. default/standard) field on the End User model. It's a toggle switch (Boolean field).

You can potentially see and interact with it in various places in Planhat, e.g. as a column when viewing End Users in the Data Explorer ...

... or as a field in an End User Full-Page Profile:

The Primary field is a way in which you can influence the Company relevance score and therefore which Company an email is mapped to.

The Primary field is particularly useful when an email address is associated with End Users at different Companies, like shamieka@tastytea.com belonging to both Tasty Tea France and Tasty Tea Germany in a screenshot above. In this example, as Shamieka is mainly based at Tasty Tea France, we have enabled the Primary field on the End User at that Company. This means Tasty Tea France will be given extra points when calculating the Company relevance score - although as other factors are also involved in the calculation (described above), this does not guarantee that Tasty Tea France will always be chosen every time shamieka@tastytea.com is involved in a synced email.

It's really easy to use the Primary field. The field is automatically included in your tenant, on the End User model. All you need to do is navigate to the field for your chosen End User record, e.g.:

... and once you're looking at the Primary field on the relevant End User(s), you simply click on the toggle switch to enable it (or disable it).

Firstly, we should note again that in the majority of cases, it's really clear which Company an email should be linked to, because the End User(s) only belong to one Company in Planhat.

In slightly more complex scenarios, where there are multiple possible Companies, "email matching mode" defines how different the Company relevance scores need to be for Planhat to conclude the email should be applied to one Company over another.

It is a setting within the "Email Setup" tab in the "Email Sync" category of the "Settings" Global Tool - it's a setting applied to your whole Planhat tenant.

"Email matching mode" has a dropdown menu, and you choose between:

... we'll define these in a moment.

Email matching mode defines how emails are assigned to Companies, using the Company relevance score. The basic principle is that each potential Company will end up with a different score, and then Planhat will assign it to the most relevant Company if it's clear who that is, or if it's not clear then the email will go to the Unassigned folder, where you can assign it manually.

If you select "Safe", then Planhat has to be really sure that the email should be associated with Company A rather than Company B (or Company C etc.), before it assigns it to Company A. A good match is concluded when Company A has a high relevance score, and all other Companies have a low relevance score.

If you select "Risky", then Planhat simply assigns the email to the Company with the highest relevance score, even if Company A's score isn't that high and Company B's score isn't much lower.

"Default" is in the middle, and assigns to Company A if it has a high score and all other Companies are much lower.

Here are the specific rules:

This setting enables you to customize the way emails are mapped to Companies, to suit your organization's preference.

Your choice comes down to accuracy v. efficiency. For cases where there is ambiguity, do you prefer fewer emails to be assigned, but assignments to be more accurate (then pick "Safe"); or alternatively, do you prefer more emails to be assigned, but have a higher chance of emails being assigned to the wrong Company (then pick "Risky")? The choice is yours.

Simply navigate to the relevant part of the "Settings" Global Tool (shown above), and choose your preferred option from the dropdown menu.

In upgraded Planhat (ws.planhat.com), the Unassigned folder is a tab within the "Email Manager" Home feature.

It contains all the emails synced into Planhat but not automatically assigned to a Company.

Click the image to view it enlarged

From here, you can manually review these emails, and manually assign them to the appropriate Company.

As we discussed earlier in this article, the Company relevance score and the email matching mode are used together to automatically assign each synced email to the appropriate Company where possible, but there are sometimes circumstances where it's unclear which Company to assign the email to, and then the email will go into "Unassigned".

The Unassigned folder (tab) shows you which emails need action.

Using the Unassigned folder, you can easily manually assign these emails to the relevant Company. You want each email to be associated with the right Company so you can view it on the relevant Company record (e.g. Full-Page Profile) and so it feeds into Company data ("Last Touch" field etc.)

"Unassigned" is a tab within "Email Manager", which is a feature within your Home, as we pictured above.

Once in the Unassigned folder, simply click on an email to open it up in a panel on the right-hand side.

Click the image to view it enlarged

You can then click on the ellipsis in the top-right of the email, and select "Assign to a Company".

This brings up a modal where you can select the Company:

You'll then see another modal, with choices related to the End User:

Make your selection and click "Save" to assign the email.