How to Capture Email Activity in Salesforce: Which Email Sync Is Best?

There’s no doubt that email is the #1 communication channel for revenue teams. Your sales reps spend up to 40% of their time on email and in meetings, meaning most of what you know (and don’t know) about your customers lives inside someone’s email inbox.

As a result, most customer conversations happen in silos. How can your account manager prepare for an upsell if they don’t know about the issues your customer support associates recently resolved? How can your implementation experts get up to speed on a new customer if they missed a discovery call? And how can sales reps effectively revive old opportunities without a historical record of previous conversations?

For many Salesforce Admins, it’s a no-brainer to capture email activity between your company and your customers inside your CRM to provide a single view of engagement. Salesforce offers a few options to accomplish this, including Email to Salesforce and the notorious Einstein Activity Capture (EAC).

But before you select an email sync solution, you should consider the requirements of your use case and the problems you’d like to solve. You’ll want to answer questions like:

• Should I sync email as tasks, custom objects, or both?
• Do I want to run Salesforce reporting on email activity?
• Should the sync be fully automated?
• How important is an intuitive, human-readable experience to my use case?
• How can I capture conversations from my entire revenue team, including members without a Salesforce license?

Let’s take stock of Salesforce’s out-of-the-box email sync solutions, and then delve into some alternatives.

Email to Salesforce: Manual Email Logging

What it’s for: Basic, manual email logging (via BCC)

One out-of-the-box tool Salesforce offers is Email to Salesforce, a free but limited email integration. It enables basic email tracking but requires reps to log every email message manually via BCC. Not only is this tedious, but it also introduces user error that affects the quality and quantity of your Salesforce data.

Ultimately, Email to Salesforce helps you capture some email conversations in your CRM, but it shouldn’t be considered a true option for a complete email activity sync. You’ll miss context from manual errors, customer replies, and any customer conversations from your revenue team beyond sales.

Einstein Activity Capture (EAC): An Incomplete Email Sync

What it’s for: Creating an email view inside a parallel object in Salesforce

Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) goes a step further than Email to Salesforce. With EAC, admins can set up an automated email sync that captures email conversations from Salesforce users and adds them to a parallel object to view engagement in one place. However, this process differs from a direct email sync to the account or contact.

Many Salesforce Admins struggle with this parallel object approach, as it can create a disjointed experience where users must context-switch between the activity object and the customer data in accounts or contacts. Even more importantly, EAC prevents you from running standard Salesforce reports, limiting the analysis and trends you can glean from your email data. EAC is free for up to 100 users and stores data for up to six months.

Limitations of these options:

The existing gaps with Salesforce’s email sync solutions are significant. They severely limit access to one of the most valuable sources of customer engagement available to modern businesses: email.

Existing email sync solutions for Salesforce are prone to limitations such as:

• Manual and error-prone email logging that sales reps don’t want to do
• Unintuitive views that don’t give you a snapshot of all communications with leads, contacts, and accounts
• No reporting at all, or a reliance on task reporting which lacks readability.
• Blind spots from inboxes belonging to non-Salesforce users (e.g. customer support, implementation, marketing)
• Limited customization, constraining the solutions you can build

Alternatives to Salesforce’s Out-of-the-Box Email Activity Sync

So at this point, you might be asking: is there a better way? After encountering many of the same problems and roadblocks with Salesforce’s tools when building an email sync solution for my team, I developed a list of key requirements for a complete solution:

1. The ability to capture all email from customer-facing teams (even non-salesforce users)
2. No manual user intervention
3. Automatically associates emails with the relevant records
4. Human-readable email display and reporting
5. Customization to build automation and workflows on top of the sync

While many third-party sales applications offer email tracking, they are expensive and inflexible. Ultimately, these tools had one of the same limitations as EAC: only capturing conversations from the team that uses them.

With these five requirements in mind, I built a custom email sync for my revenue team. The solution was such a hit that, after additional development and testing, we can now offer it as an unlocked package to save Salesforce admins much of the time and headache I experienced.

How Nylas Email for Salesforce Can Help

Nylas Email for Salesforce provides instant, automated access to data from 100% of email service providers. It lets you authenticate your users automatically, sync any inbox to your Salesforce instance (whether they belong to a Salesforce user or not), and build a unified view of conversations as tasks or custom objects in under an hour.

The package unlocks powerful functionality for admins, including trigger flows and apex, enforced sharing rules with email record ownership, and a Nylas Account Inbox Lighting Web Component to display email in a clean, threaded view. Once implemented, your users can get up to speed fast on in-progress deals, drive alignment on the best next steps, and use email engagement to improve forecasting.

If you’d like to learn more about my experience building a Salesforce email syncing tool and how Nylas Email for Salesforce can help you capture complete customer context, join me on Jun 13th at 11:00 am PT for a live session and Q&A. We’ll also share some of the many use cases our customers have built using the package, including Gen AI-powered workflows, auto-contacts sync from email, and more.