Emailing overview

As you begin to use Close, we recommend that you handle all of your customer communication through Close directly. In addition to having any relevant information at your fingertips, you’ll take advantage of the key features of the platform.

To email a Lead, simply locate the Contact and click on the email icon. You can click on additional Contacts if you want to send to multiple people.

Sending an Email

Craft and send your messages as you would in any email client. Embed images, links, and attachments as needed. Any attachment on outgoing or incoming messages will be available for download.

Any email you receive will go into your Close Inbox as a notification and sync onto the Lead itself. You can reply to those emails either from your Inbox directly or on the Lead page and mark the email as done.

Click this icon to reply to an email

Email attachments in Close allow you to send and receive external files with your emails.

Attach a file to an email when:

• Sending an individual email
• Sending an Email Template

To attach a file to an individual email, simply click on the paper clip icon at the bottom of your email draft and select your file.

Attach a file to an email

Email Templates can also include attachments. This can be useful if you have a post-demo PDF or if you send blank contracts when an opportunity is about to close.

Template Attachments

Customizing an Email Template with HTML

Close's code editor allows you to customize the appearance of emails you send from Close.

Similar to attachments you can use the code editor when:

• Sending an individual email
• Sending an Email Template

To input custom code into an email, simply click on the "< >" at the bottom of your email draft and paste your information as shown below.

Add custom HTML to your email

Email Reminders

Set a follow-up Reminder to have Close automatically remind you if a Lead has not responded to your latest email. Using follow-up Reminders instead of creating a Task is a great way to remove clutter from your Inbox, and provides more context when following up with a Lead.

To set an email Reminder, simply check the “Remind me to follow up” box and select the timeframe or date from the dropdown.

Setting an Email Reminder

The clock icon indicates the email has a follow-up Reminder attached. Hover over this icon to see when your Reminder is set. Reminders are automatically cleared if someone responds. Another great reason to use them instead of Tasks.

Active Reminder Indication

If your email does not receive a reply by the date of your Reminder, you’ll see the Reminder appear in your Inbox.

Inbox Reminder Task

Scheduling an Email

Close gives you the ability to draft an email and send it at a future date/time. Sending later is a great way to automate certain workflows. For example, if you have a demo set with a customer, you might want to schedule a reminder email to go out the day before, hopefully ensuring your Lead attends your demo.

Your email will go out at the date and time you set. You will see the email says scheduled and have the ability to convert the email back to a draft if needed.

Send Later date & time are always based on your current timezone.

Scheduling an Email

Tracking Email Opens

By default, Close will track the opens of any email you send from within Close. You will see an indication on each message that the email was opened. You can hover over the indicator for additional information, such as the email address that opened the message, when, and how many times it was opened.

Email Tracking Popover

If you’re sending emails from outside of Close, the tracking information will not be available within Close. Also, depending on the recipients email client setup, your opens may not be able to be tracked. That means that your open rates are likely higher than you’ll see in reporting.

To turn this setting on or off, simply go to Settings > Communication > Email and look for this checkbox.

Email tracking setting

Sending as Another Email Address

If your team sends certain materials from a generic address or you have multiple email accounts synced in under your Settings > Connected Accounts, your email addresses will appear as a dropdown when drafting an email. Simply click on it to adjust the sender while keeping your email signature the same.

Sending from Another Address

Sending as Another User

If you want to send a message on behalf of other Close users and their email addresses, you can do so by using Send As feature. You can use Send As in manual emails, bulk emails, and sequence emails.

You can't send emails to your own company domain email addresses using Send As feature. If you try to send an email from hr@example.com to john@example.com email will be converted to a draft and won't be sent out.

Send As List

Send As feature is available only to users who explicitly allow other users to send on their behalf. If you'd like to send as another user, that user must first add you to their Allowed By You list under Settings > Send As. In the example below, Katie is adding John so he can send emails on her behalf.

When Katie added John to her Allowed By You list, at the same time John will see Katie in his You Are Allowed list that is read-only and shows you which users allowed you to send emails on their behalf.

Revoke Allowed User>

You can revoke this permission at any time by going to your Send As List > Allowed By You > click on X button - any emails that have been scheduled won't send without your approval and any existing email sequences will be automatically paused.

Selecting a Sender

With John being added to Katie's Send As List, John can go to his lead page and start sending as Katie by selecting her email from the dropdown:

Katie's signature will be used and after the email was sent out there will be a Sent As: indication in place of the From: field:

The same dropdown is available in Bulk Emails and Email Sequences as well.

Email Replies

Replies to Sent As emails will go to the Inbox of a user who allowed the sending on their behalf - in the example above Katie would receive a reply to an email that John sent as her.

Creating + Sharing Email Templates

If you find yourself sending similar messages over and over, you may want to consider using the Email Templates feature within Close.

Creating an Email Template

Email Template Tags

You can also customize your Template with Template Tags. Template Tags allow you to add dynamic lead data to your Email Templates. You can use these tags to pull in information like the Lead Name, Contact Information, or any Lead or Contact Custom Fields. Tags will pull individual lead or contact information and embed it into the email automatically.

Default Template Tags:

Using Template Tags

If you’re creating Templates for your team, you can choose to share the Template with the rest of your organization.

Share template with organization

Sending Email Templates

Now that you have a Template set up, you can use the Template when emailing your leads. Simply select your Template from the dropdown when drafting your email. Your Template will populate, and allow you to edit if necessary.

Sending an Email Template

Bulk Emailing

If you’re on our Professional or Business Plan, you can also take advantage of Bulk Emailing from within Close.

Once you have your list of leads prepared, simply click the Email button at the top of the lead list to initiate a bulk email.

You’ll have a few options to select from while configuring your Bulk Email.

• From - Choose who the message will appear to come from (this will only appear if you have the ability to send from multiple addresses)

• Template - Decide which Template you’ll be sending

• For each Lead, email - Your choices here are the first Contact on the Lead, or all Contacts on the Lead. This may vary based on the context of the Bulk Email.

Once you've decided on these items, you’ll be able to preview your Bulk Email. Previewing allows you to review your Template Tags and ensure that the message you’re sending is the correct one Click the arrow at the top of the viewing window to scroll between recipients. If everything looks good, click send. Your Bulk Email will be sent and you’ll receive an email once it’s completed.

Bulk emailing in Close

Is there a limit for bulk emailing?

Bulk emails are sent just like any other email you send in Close; they are sent through your own SMTP email server (which is listed under your email settings), so its important to know your email service provider's daily limits.

Most email providers, such as Gmail / Google Apps and Office 365 will throttle or restrict the quantity or frequency of outgoing emails you're able to send in a given period of time. If you go over those limits they will likely disconnect your email account from Close and you'll see an error under Settings > Connected Accounts.

Using a separate email service for outgoing emails

You can set Close to use a dedicated email sending service like Mailgun, Sendgrid, or Amazon SES. When doing this, we recommended you:

• Keep sending email "From" your main email address.
• Follow your provider's instructions to update your DNS records. You'll want your SPF records to indicate that their service has permission to send email from your domain name.
• Change your outgoing email settings (SMTP) in Close. Enter the SMTP host, username, and password information that Mailgun, Sendgrid, or Amazon SES provides you.
• Keep your incoming email (IMAP) settings in Close the same so that they point at your main email inbox server (e.g., imap.google.com or whatever email system your main work email system uses).

Check out a walkthrough of this process (using Mailgun) over here.

If everything is set up and working properly then recipients of your emails won't notice that you're using a 3rd party service to send email. And your incoming emails should continue showing up inside of Close.

Sending email error

Sometimes an error might occur while trying to send out your emails. Those emails will be indicated by a red error tag and an explanation of why sending failed. Usually, when there is a problem with an email sending, Close will first retry sending several times in a row automatically while the email is in outbox status, until failing and transitioning into an error state where your action is required.

Email error

The most common error is that your email account (located under Settings > Connected Accounts) disconnected due to the following:

• your email credentials changed (you changed your email password)
• you enabled/disabled the email 2FA (multi-factor authentication)
• you went over the sending limits and your email provider blocked you from sending more (refer to the section above on how to get around this)

When something like that happens, you'll receive a Close email [Close] Action required: Not syncing email account explaining what connected account was disconnected, and how to re-connect it.

To fix it, go to Settings > Connected Accounts > click on the errored account (usually indicated with a red background) and then:

• if it's a Gmail account - click on Reconnect... and follow the process
• if it's a Custom email account - click on Edit IMAP > enter password > click Save, and/or click on Edit SMTP > enter password > click Save

Successfully connected email account

Once re-connected (as indicated by green Connected status), all emails in your outbox that were sent from this email account (you can find all emails within an outbox with a search query has:outbox_emails ) will be sent automatically, and all incoming emails will be synced retroactively automatically.

However, the emails that are in the error status (you can find all errored emails with a search query has:error_emails) need to be resumed manually by clicking on Retry Sending. If your email sequence was paused and is in-error, please reach out to support@close.com to resume all sequence subscriptions at once after you verified that your email account has reconnected successfully.