Syncing your emails to Planhat gives you a powerful way of storing all customer conversations in your customer platform. Having the email conversation stored in the same place as you have your customer data, contracts, revenue data and support tickets gives you a true "single source of truth" for your team.
Planhat will only sync emails to or from your customers. We do not sync any internal emails and you can block any specific domains or email addresses from being synced if needed.
🔑 Key details
Planhat knows who your customers are based on the customer data you have in Planhat and their email domains.
After syncing your email account (see below), Planhat reviews your email meta-data, identifies emails to or from your customers and syncs them.
Planhat will not store any emails that are not customer related - it recognises your customers based on their email domains (e.g. @yourcustomer.com) which are stored on each Company in Planhat.
Once set up, every time you or one of your colleagues receives or sends an email from or to a customer, the email will show up in the Company / End User Profiles and in Inbox Pages (depending on how you have configured them).
If you receive an email from someone with the same domain as a Company, but who is not currently an End User in Planhat, Planhat can automatically create an End User using details from the email. This is optional but very helpful in some instances. Note, however, that this requires a unique domain match: if the domain exists on multiple Companies, no End User will be created.
Email attachments are included in the Outlook and Gmail email syncs (example email attachment pictured below). Only users on the email thread will be able to access the attachments.
📧 How to sync your email with Planhat
🚀 Quick tip: if you are looking for further details on how to sync Gmail and Outlook with Planhat, then check out this article.
1. Click on your name in the top-right corner of your Planhat tenant, and select "Profile".
2. Go to the "Email" tab.
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3. Click "Enable Google account access" or "Enable Outlook account access" (orange button shown above) and then "Enable", and then click through to give the relevant access.
4. Select the labels/folders you would like to sync, and click "Save". Note that you need to select subfolders individually; they won't be automatically selected if you select a parent folder
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Once saved, you'll see that the text in gray underneath will change to "Email sync for [Google/Outlook] is enabled".
Emails usually sync to Planhat within 30 minutes of appearing in your email client (but can in extraordinary circumstances take up to 24 hours to show).
Once synced, you can see emails on their related Company Profile and in Inbox Pages. The metric "Last Touch" will also update.
A note on Outlook custom folders and subfolders
If you have manually moved an email into a custom folder or a subfolder (nested folder) in Outlook, and then there are subsequent messages in that email thread, the Outlook UI can make it appear as if those subsequent sent/received emails are also in that folder, whereas actually they are still located in the default "Sent Items" and "Inbox" folders.
For example, in the screenshot below, in Outlook it seems like there are three emails in this thread within this custom "Customers" subfolder:
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But actually, although the oldest email was manually moved (dragged) into this custom subfolder, the following sent email is actually still in the "Sent Items" folder ...
... and the most recent received email is actually in the "Inbox" folder.
Emails will only sync into Planhat if they actually are (not just appear to be) in a folder that has been selected in the checkboxes in the "Email" tab of the Planhat User Profile, as we discussed/showed earlier in this article.
If you had only selected the "Customers" folder to be synced in this case, but then in Outlook you manually dragged each incoming or sent email from the thread into this folder, then they would all sync.
If you don't want to have to manually drag each email in Outlook in this way, you can set up email inbox rules in Outlook so that incoming emails automatically file themselves into the appropriate folder. However, this is not possible for sent emails, so we recommend that you ensure that the "Sent Items" checkbox is selected in your User Profile so that those emails are synced into Planhat.
Bcc'ing emails to Planhat
As an alternative, you can also get your sent emails copied into Planhat by bcc'ing the address yourcompanyname@planhatmail.com. We do not recommend this approach as it leads to incomplete customer data existing in Planhat, but in certain use cases it can be helpful.
When emails are bcc'd to Planhat they will be associated with the recipient End User if the End User already exists, but they will not show in chains like normally synced emails. While it's an option that can help in some circumstances, we do not recommend this approach despite its popularity with some CRMs.
How to exclude certain emails from syncing
Planhat makes sure you're getting all of the information you need about a customer within the platform and that is why Planhat can create a new End User if it detects an email with a domain that matches an existing Company.
This is great so you can make sure to stay on top of everything, but there are certain emails (for example service emails, marketing campaign emails or sensitive emails) that you don't need to be synced and they just end up crowding your view.
First, set up "Internal Domain" (your own domains) to filter out internal communications (e.g. between colleagues). Note that if you have multiple domains (e.g. planhat.com and planhat.co.uk) you need to input all of them!
Secondly, use advanced filtering to block out specific content: read more about it here!
📌 Important to note
Planhat syncs emails from Gmail and Outlook.
When you first sync your emails into Planhat, we look 30 days back (as default), so if you sent an email before then it will not be synced. This can be extended up to 360 days if required; please contact your CSM, or Support via chat, if you need this extension.
When emailing End Users that are not in Planhat, if you have the "Automatic Detection of New Contacts" setting enabled (talk to your CSM about this), Planhat can auto-create End Users if there's a matching related domain. If you don't have this setting turned on, and you are emailing with a contact who is not an End User in Planhat but does have a related domain, we will not sync this email.
Specific email addresses and domains can be blocked from syncing altogether (contact us if you want to do this as we'll need to update your account).
All synced emails can be removed at any time by the User (e.g. you).
If an email syncs to the wrong Company owing to duplicate related domains, in an Inbox Page, you can move it by clicking the ellipsis button on the email and clicking "Assign to a different company".
Email sync is available to all User Types (including View Users), as long as they have the appropriate permission enabled in their Roles.