The AdvisorEngine Blog

How financial advisors can seamlessly integrate email into their CRM

Written by Kathy Crowley | Oct 28, 2021 10:29:34 PM

Think about it for a minute, how much does your business rely on email communication? 

Email has become such an important method of business communication. It’s accessible, fast, cheap and private - plus, it can be easily replicated and stored. 

I’ve actually had an email account since I was in college. But the norm these days is that elementary-aged kids are using email to communicate with teachers and collaborate with friends on class projects.  

According to statistics more than half of the global population now uses email - 4.3 billion people have active email accounts. 

Since building strong relationships is a core element of providing financial advice, a financial advisor Client Relationship Management (CRM) system should support email functionality. 

It’s no wonder that financial advisors are thrilled with AdvisorEngine CRM's latest integration with Office 365. 

AdvisorEngine CRM’s Office 365 integration

I had the chance to catch up with our Product Manager in charge of this integration, Arden Birdwell, and she described why this integration is so important, “Using the new email management piece, advisors can manage all aspects of their email within AdvisorEngine - no need to toggle between the CRM and Microsoft Outlook.”

Birdwell continued, “With this integration, you can automatically capture your email in both AdvisorEngine CRM and Outlook - this includes all received, sent, reply, reply all and forwarded emails.” Here are just some of the features: 

  • Seamlessly sync contacts between Office 365 and AdvisorEngine CRM 

  • Sync calendar events between Office 365 Calendar and AdvisorEngine CRM

  • Manage Emails within AdvisorEngine CRM in the new Email Management Workspace and from one record or action to another

  • Capture or route emails from email addresses that are not on a record

  • Remove captured email from an action or a record

  • Click the action ID or record ID from a recorded email to directly open the corresponding action or record 

Feedback from early integration users

Before rolling out this integration, we were able to test the market. I am pleased to say that we received a lot of positive feedback from our early users.

Diane Gaines, from Petersen Hastings Investment Management, reported that this integration delivered, “increased efficiency, fewer clicks, more visibility, quicker turn-around.” Who wouldn’t want increased efficiency?  

“Things seem more seamless.” Michael Sicuranza of Affinity Wealth Management LLC said. That was the goal of this project, to make things for financial advisory firms more seamless and efficient.

The ability to two-way sync your contacts, calendar and email provides those key data points necessary for success. 

Tips before enabling integration

Birdwell also provided some important tips to successfully launch the integration, “Any user that previously used the Junxure Outlook add-in should uninstall the add-in through the operating system prior to enabling the Office 365 integration.” 

To ensure your data is kept clean and consistent, Birdwell recommends that you set a unique tag such as “ContactSync” to your records imported from Outlook. This makes it easy to find them and ensures all necessary data points are accurately filled. And to eliminate duplicate data when initially setting up your contact sync, begin from a separate, empty folder. 

Next steps

Schedule a demo today to find out how to add this Office 365 integration to your technology stack.