The Ultimate Guide to Email Integrations

Even with the explosion of messaging tools, email continues to be the bedrock of business communication. In fact, more people use email today than ever before in history. By 2024, the number of worldwide email users will increase to more than 4.2B, and the email marketing industry alone will be worth $22.16bn.

In response to this data, more SaaS applications offer an email communication layer within their apps: from customer relationship management software (CRM) to applicant tracking software (ATS), to HR, legal, and real estate software.

Email integration is a powerful asset to any SaaS app. Users become more engaged with your platform when they can send, receive, and track analytics on emails all within one dashboard. The need to context-switch between what were formerly two disparate systems — email service providers (ESPs) and software applications — is reduced or eradicated. Time spent on manual data entry goes down, your customer’s efficiency goes up, and user adoption grows.

In fact, one study from Accenture shows that sales reps alone spend as much as 20% of their day on manual data entry.4 By eliminating this need, you make the end-users of your software 235% more efficient — a huge value-add that can easily be monetized.

While it’s clear that creating mailbox integration for your application is beneficial for both your customers and your business, implementing the functionality is more difficult. When approaching the decision to build the integration in-house from scratch, or employ an API, there are a few things to consider. The purpose of this paper is to provide you with the tools you need to navigate the build vs. buy decision and get the biggest ROI from your email integration (both time and financial).