Email management software

What’s the difference between an email client/webmail and email management software?

Webmail and email clients are less advanced and offer fewer key features. At their core, webmail and email clients were created for personal use, while email management software was created for solopreneurs, businesses, and organizations that receive thousands of emails per day and need help managing them.

Webmail/Email clients	Email management software
Very limited or no automation options	Countless automation options
Cluttered with ads/unwanted email	No ads/unwanted email
No collaboration options	Built for collaboration (shared inbox that supports team email management)
Lack advanced filtering	Tags and ticket ids for easy filtering
No canned responses	Unlimited canned responses
Limited storage	Unlimited storage
Limited or no email templates	Offer customizable email templates
Limited contact fields	Contact fields + a built-in CRM
No private/internal notes	Offer private/internal notes
No option to merge/split emails	Offer email merging/splitting
No agent collision detection	Offer agent collision detection
Some offer multiple email tabs	Offer multiple email tabs
No third party integrations	Hundreds of third-party integrations
No omnichannel capabilities	Omnichannel capabilities
Offer mobile email apps	Offer mobile email apps

How many email addresses/email accounts can you integrate with an email management tool?

Advanced email management tools like LiveAgent don’t impose any limits on the number of email addresses you can connect with the software.

Is it safe to use email management tools?

Arguably, email management software is often safer than traditional email. Imagine this scenario:

• You’re using Gmail or Outlook to resolve customer emails.
• You have multiple employees who take different shifts.

Naturally, you will have to share your email login credentials with multiple people, which can be a security threat — especially if they use public computers or share devices with others.

With an email management system, every employee has their unique login credentials, so it’s way more secure for you and your entire team.

Who can benefit from using email management software?

Email management software can be a benefit to anyone who answers tons of customer service emails every day– regardless of company size. Whether you’re a one-man team or a large business, an email management solution is a must-have. Plenty of reports have confirmed that utilizing email support software increases productivity, decreases stress levels, and ultimately saves time and money.

How can you benefit from email management software?

Improved email response time and increased customer satisfaction

Using email management software can improve response time which, in turn, improve customer experiences and customer satisfaction. With automated workflow rules in place, the software will automatically distribute incoming mail amongst your employees. Gone are the days of manual assignments and monitoring email activity.

Email management software wastes no time and ensures everyone has a clear understanding of their responsibilities. As mentioned above, this improves response time, as it eliminates confusion, email tracking, loitering, and manual task management. With email management software in place, all support agents can simply log in to the software and start answering customer service emails.

Increases productivity and lowers stress levels

The beauty of an email management system is that it can take on many tasks and solve them on its own. For example, the software can use automated workflow rules to resolve tickets that haven’t received any response in a specific amount of time. Alternatively, the software can send out automatic email follow-ups to customers that haven’t responded to your messages, or send OOO messages when needed. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having this type of software in place takes extra responsibility off your shoulders. It eliminates repetitive and mundane tasks, and thus lowers stress levels and improves productivity. In essence, it creates the perfect workflow.

Saves money and increases return on investment

Here’s another reason why you’ll fall in love with email management software. It saves you money. When your agents don’t waste time on mundane tasks, and when their sole focus is on resolving customer queries, you’re saving money.

Moreover, according to Financesonline, for every $1 you invest in customer experience through help desks and similar platforms [such as email management software], you can reap a return on investment of $3.

Eliminates device and account monitoring

If you want to take it a step further, connect your email management software with other communication channels such as live chat, phone, or social media, and improve your productivity even further. You can put an end to the endless device and account monitoring that’s both distracting and unproductive.

Having all messages in one place– whether they’re emails, Instagram comments or real-time live chats makes it even easier to maximize all the benefits that come with the email management system.

What features should email management software have?

A shared universal email inbox

A shared universal inbox is the star feature of email management software. The team inbox can streamline all messages from multiple email addresses, social media accounts, webchats, and even phones.

If you’ve never worked with a collaboration platform like the universal inbox, this may be hard to imagine, but honestly, it’s the best feature that will improve your customer’s and agent’s experiences by miles. The cherry on top is that all your agents will have their unique login to the system, allowing them to work on separate issues at the same time.

Learn more about the shared mailbox.

Departments and responsibilities (transfers)

The two other star features of email management software are departments and responsibilities. By creating different departments for your marketing, IT support, or sales teams, you’ll be able to organize your inbox even better. Filtering will be easier, and assigning responsibilities via automation rules will be a piece of cake.

As an example, you can set up an automated workflow rule that will automatically route all emails containing the words “reset” and “password” to the IT department, or even a dedicated IT support representative.

Learn more about departments or responsibilities.

Workflow management and email marketing automation rules

We’ve briefly touched upon the powers of email marketing automation. There are countless things you can do with email management software– from automatically adding tags to emails, assigning emails to departments and agents, to email scheduling that automatically sends out pre-formatted follow-up emails after a certain period of time has elapsed since your last contact, and even OOF messages.

Learn more about rules.

Robust analytics tools and reporting features

With traditional email, it’s hard to determine how well you’re doing in terms of performance and quality. Are you meeting industry benchmarks such as the average email response rate? Are your customers satisfied with the service they’re getting?

Interestingly enough, according to a survey by Bain & Company, 80% of CEOs believe their company delivers superior customer service. However, only 8% of their customers agree.

With email management software analytics and reporting features, you’ll be able to identify areas of improvement thanks to real data insights.

Learn more about analytics and reporting.

Team collaboration features and collision detection

Some webmails (namely Gmail) offer a built-in chat service. However, most mail clients/webmails don’t, making them inadequate when it comes to collaboration. In our opinion, using external chat tools is counterproductive, as having to switch between tools can make you lose your train of thought, and also wastes precious time.

Email management software like LiveAgent offers built-in internal chatting and calling options, making it easy as 1,2,3, to get in touch with your colleagues when you’re feeling stuck.

Moreover, tools like LiveAgent have agent collision detection features in place. These features ensure that no email is answered twice. They alert each agent that’s viewing an email that’s being worked on, ensuring there’s no duplicity or accidental erasing of work.

Learn more about agent collision detection, internal chats, or internal calls.

Customizable email templates

Another feature that’s missing from the arsenal of traditional email clients/webmail are customizable email templates that can be used to send out marketing emails such as newsletters, customer service emails like password reset emails, or transactional emails that confirm an order. Of course, customizable email templates are available in LiveAgent’s email management platform.

Learn more about email templates.

CRM and custom CRM fields

To make it even better, email management software has stellar customer relationship management (CRM) features. Apart from a built-in CRM that’s always on hand, you can record custom information about your clients that can help you provide more knowledgeable and personalized customer service.

Learn more about CRM.

Multiple ticket/email tabs

Scared of missing out on multiple email tabs? Don’t be. Email management software offers this feature as well. It enables you to answer several emails at once, by simply switching between email tabs. This feature is especially useful used in conjunction with canned responses/predefined answers.

Learn more about multiple ticket tabs.

Email tags

Another feature that traditional email clients are lack but are prominent in email management software are tags. Tags are used to make filtering, organizing, and viewing an email’s contents at a glance.

Learn more about tags.

Task managers and SLA monitoring features

Advanced email management software contains functions that act as task managers and notify agents about high-priority/critical emails that need to be resolved. Generally, the emails (tickets) that show up in the task manager have been unanswered for a long time or are tied to SLAs (service level agreements).

Learn more about the To Solve Button.

Private notes

Private notes in email management software enable you to disclose extra information about a given email, customer, or resolution process. Your colleagues can view these notes at any time as they resolve a particular mail/query. If you’d like, you can also use private notes as reminders.

Learn more about notes.

Canned messages and predefined answers

Canned responses are another great feature that is a part of email management software. They enable you to create predefined answers to your customer’s most frequently asked questions. When you receive an email that requires a generic response to such a question, you can save yourself time by simply clicking on the canned response button and selecting the answer that you want.

Learn more about canned responses.

Ticket splitting/merging

Email management tools like LiveAgent offer ticket-splitting and merging. The feature is unique and can improve resolution times and agent efficiency. For example, if an incoming email raises multiple issues and needs to be resolved by multiple departments (such as sales and IT) the mail can be split in two to ensure faster problem resolution.

Alternatively, if a client sends you multiple emails about the same issue, the emails can be merged into a single email thread.

Learn more about split tickets and ticket merging.

Third-party integrations

Most email management software offers third-party integrations to ensure the perfect workflow. Integrations can be made with payment processors, customer relationship management systems, social media apps, and more.

Having these integrations in place ensures agents don’t have to log in to third-party apps and input data into two systems.

See all integrations.

Internal knowledge base and unlimited storage space

Limited email storage is something that we all battle daily, right? Not if you’re using email management software! Tools like LiveAgent offer unlimited email history. You won’t have to delete any emails if you don’t want to, and there won’t be any imposed limits on document storage. You can store an unlimited amount of internal documents, guides, and best practices in the software itself.

Learn more about internal knowledge management.

How to find the right email management software

Convinced that email management software is the right solution for you and your business? Great, read on to find out how to pick the right email management tool.

Write down your requirements and do some research

The first step towards finding the right email tracking software is to write down your requirements and consider your budget, as each email service provider offers a different range of features. Do you want a tool that’s simply used for managing emails? Do you want a tool that will also streamline other messages into your inbox? What additional features do you need? Is it a scalable email service?

Once you’ve gotten down a list of your requirements, it’s time to conduct some research. We recommend looking at each service providers’:

• Product review portals (such as G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, TrustRadius, GetApp)
• YouTube reviews

• Social media
• Website
• Comparison articles

Once you’ve vetted each software, and know which ones you want to test, it’s time to create a free trial.

Create free trial accounts and test features

After you’ve selected your top choices, it’s time to create a free trial. We recommend that you test all key features and get as familiar with them as possible. Try to:

• Connect multiple email addresses with your team inbox
• Set up integrations
• Invite agents/email users into your software
• Create departments for your IT, marketing, and sales teams
• Set up automation rules to find the perfect workflow
• Set up email templates for critical emails

As you’re testing everything, make notes of what you like and what you don’t. You’ll quickly see which email platform is most in tune with your needs. If your free trial expires too soon and you want additional time for testing all the features, don’t hesitate to reach out to customer support.

Most email management software vendors will be more than happy to extend your trial by a few weeks.

Happy customers are the best customers

We offer concierge migration services from most of the popular help desk solutions.

View more

Book a demo/speak with a sales manager

If you can’t make up your mind between two email management software, book a demo and speak with the sales team. Present a list of what you would like to achieve, ask questions, and make notes of the service you’re receiving.

Generally, your sales manager’s behavior can be a good indicator of how you’ll be treated by the vendor’s customer service teams when you’re a paying customer. If you feel like they’re knowledgeable about the product and ready to help at any time, you can be sure that you’re making a good decision.

However, if you feel like they can’t answer your questions and aren’t genuinely interested in your success, you should go for a different email management software.

What’s a good price for email management software?

This is a hard question to answer. Most email management software is subscription-based, so you can expect to pay in monthly installments. However, each email management software is different in what it offers in terms of features, integrations, and agent seats.

Looking at trusted software review sites we can say that a normal price range ranges from $15 – $39 per agent per month.

If this price range is too high for you, consider a free email management tool.

What’s a good free email management software?

Although free email management tools are prevalent, they are more limited in terms of features.

Not to toot our own horn, but LiveAgent offers a pretty good free email management plan that still offers a large arsenal of free features. For example LiveAgent free offers:

• 1 email address integration
• Basic reporting
• Knowledge base management
• A 7-day ticket history
• 1 chat button and 1 phone number integration
• Email merging and splitting
• Custom CRM ticket fields
• Task management
• Tags
• Private notes
• Email transfers
• Multiple email tabs
• 24/7 customer support