Social CRMs and Gmail integration

Written on May 19th, 2010 by Vincenzo Vecchio
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Recent changes in Gmail APIs have opened the door to third parties applications which can integrate into Gmail.

I’ve been (and still am) testing a few interesting (social)CRM applications which integrate into Gmail.
Here is what I found:

  1. Rapportive: probably the best one in terms of seamless integration with Gmail. Every time you open an email it shows you additional information on the right column, hiding ads. It shows you all the social media information that is is able to find about the contact you have received the email from, including facebook, linkedin, twitter status and a picture. Nice looking integration but still lacks follow-up, reminders and auto-send features.
  2. etacts: integrates into Gmail’s right column, moving down the ads. It is much more oriented to follow-up email, finding un-answered emails, getting in touch with people or prospects setting automatic reminders. Each time you send an email you can decide when should etacts remind you, in the case your recipient hasn’t answered. It keeps track of how many emails (and calls) you’ve sent and received from a given contact. The annoying thing is that it opens pop-up windows to show you some of the info. Still has some bugs and in some cases I think it ignores answers.
  3. CureCRM: the only one with auto-sending options. CureCRM integrates an email Robot which (should) send emails automatically for you at given intervals. You can set email templates to send to prospects with personalized signatures. It has an Outlook plug-in, which I have not tested since I’m not an Outlook user. It can be integrated into Google Apps, even if I think the pay-per-email pricing is really too expensive.

They all have add-ons for Firefox and Chrome.

Please let me know about more similar applications..

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