How to log outreach emails as activity in Salesforce

The simplest way to record an email you sent outside Salesforce is Email to Salesforce. Every user has a personal Email to Salesforce address in their settings. When you BCC that address on an outgoing email, or forward a sent email to it, Salesforce looks up each recipient's address and logs the email on the matching lead or contact. If your team works in Outlook or Gmail, the Salesforce integration for those inboxes adds a side panel where you can open the matching record and log an email with one click. Einstein Activity Capture goes further and syncs email between your inbox and Salesforce automatically, so matched emails appear on the activity timeline without anyone lifting a finger. Sales engagement tools such as Outreach, Salesloft, and Apollo usually have their own Salesforce sync that logs each email they send as a completed task.

Each of these routes depends on two things going right. The first is that the email passes through a route someone set up: a rep who forgets to BCC, a campaign sent from a shared address, or a tool nobody connected leaves no trace in Salesforce. The second is that the recipient's address already matches a lead or contact. Email to Salesforce sets aside the emails it can't match as unresolved items, which someone has to sort by hand, and the other routes simply skip them. Einstein Activity Capture has one more catch to check before you rely on it. Depending on your edition and settings, the emails it captures may be stored outside your standard activity records, which affects what shows up in activity reports.

A good result is simple to describe. Every outreach email sits on the timeline of the person who received it, logged once, dated when it was sent, from the person who sent it, and linked to their account or open opportunity where one exists. Replies sit beside the emails they answer. And the record tells the next person who opens it what happens next.

Kite does that work for you. It gathers the outreach from wherever it was sent, matches each recipient to the right Salesforce record, and logs every email along with the follow-up.

Start by telling Kite which outreach you want recorded. You can ask it to catch up on emails already sent:

"Log every outreach email I sent from Gmail in the last two weeks on the matching Salesforce leads and contacts."

Or you can ask it to keep the record as it goes:

"When you send the webinar follow-ups, log each one in Salesforce and add a follow-up task for the owner."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. Because it knows your customers and competitors from its research, it can tell an outreach email from a customer support thread or a note to a vendor, so only outreach ends up in Salesforce.

You'll need to connect your Salesforce account through OAuth so Kite can read your leads and contacts and write activity to them. To log emails sent from your own inbox, connect your Gmail or Outlook account as well. Emails that Kite sends for you need no extra connection, because Kite keeps a record of each one as it goes out. If your outreach went out through another tool, you can export the sent emails as a CSV file and share it with Kite in Slack.

Logging activity is routine CRM work, so Kite records the emails and then tells you what it did. If you'd like to see the list of matches before anything reaches Salesforce, say so in your request.

Kite starts by collecting the emails you asked it to log and keeping only the outreach. Emails Kite sent itself, from your team's Kite address or a connected email account, come with the subject, body, recipient, send time, and message identifier it saved when each one went out. With Gmail or Outlook connected, Kite reads your sent mail for the period you named. It keeps the emails sent to prospects, leads, and customers, and leaves out internal threads, newsletters, receipts, and messages to vendors.

For each email it keeps, Kite notes the sender, every address on the To and CC lines, the subject, the body, and the exact time it was sent. It also groups emails into their threads, so a first touch and its follow-ups are logged as a sequence rather than as unrelated messages.

Kite logs each email on the record your team actually works, which means finding whether the recipient is a lead or a contact. It searches your Salesforce leads and your contacts by the recipient's email address. Salesforce's search matches partial addresses, so Kite confirms the exact address on every result before it uses one.

When a person exists as both, because a lead was never converted or a duplicate slipped in, Kite logs the email on the contact, since that record carries the account and its opportunities. It then reports the stray lead so your team can merge it. When a contact belongs to an account with an open opportunity, Kite reads the opportunity's stage and owner so the email can count toward that deal.

Kite makes sure an email to someone Salesforce doesn't know about still gets recorded. When the recipient is a prospect from a campaign Kite ran, it already has their name, title, company, and the reason they were chosen, so it creates them as a lead with the lead source and company details filled in, then logs the email on the new record.

When the recipient is someone you emailed on your own and Kite can't place, it doesn't guess. It lists the person in its summary with the email it couldn't log, and you can tell it to create the lead or leave them out.

Kite checks each record's existing activity before it writes, so an email that Email to Salesforce or a sales tool already recorded doesn't appear twice. It searches the person's logged emails and tasks for one with the same subject sent on the same day. When it finds a match, it skips the email and counts it as already logged.

Kite writes each email to Salesforce as an email message on the lead or contact's activity timeline. The record carries the following details:

• Subject
• The full body of the email
• Sender's address
• Every recipient on the To and CC lines
• The date and time the email was actually sent
• A status of Sent, marked as outgoing

Because Kite uses the original send time rather than the time it logs the email, a backfill of last month's outreach reads in the right order on the timeline.

Some Salesforce orgs don't allow email message records to be created this way. In that case, Kite logs each email as a completed task instead. The task's subject starts with "Email:" followed by the email's subject, its comments hold the body, its date is the day the email went out, and it's linked to the person and to their account or open opportunity.

Kite records the other side of the conversation too. When a prospect replies, whether to your team's Kite address or to a connected inbox, Kite logs the reply as an incoming email on the same record, so the timeline shows the exchange in order. If the reply asks to stop hearing from you, Kite marks the person as opted out of email in Salesforce, so nobody on your team emails them again by mistake.

For each person who still needs a next step, Kite creates a task for the record's owner with a due date, such as a reminder to follow up in four days if no reply arrives. When a reply shows real interest, it can update the lead's status so the right rep picks it up.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It says how many emails it logged and on how many leads and contacts, how many were already in Salesforce, which leads it created, and which recipients it couldn't place. It also lists any duplicate records it noticed along the way. If you want outreach recorded continuously, ask Kite to run the job every day, and it will log the new emails and post each day's summary in the same place.

When Kite finishes, every outreach email you asked about is on the right Salesforce record, and your conversation with Kite holds the record of what changed.