Business or sales teams need an efficient system to manage emails and communicate with prospects.
Shared mailboxes or team inboxes are a great way to help sales teams stay organized and ensure that no email goes unnoticed. Thus, to cater to this purpose, there is a need to make a wise choice regarding which shared mailbox is most efficient. Because not all collaborative software or hacks will give them the same value.
Before we proceed, let’s understand that the blog is not about a group inbox like Shared Mailbox in Microsoft Office 365 which has a group email ID, and sending or receiving occurs from the group email address. So let’s not confuse ourselves.
This article discusses the top 10 shared mailbox software and the features you should look for in such software.
From automated email responses to collaboration tools, a tool having these features will help sales teams get the most out of their shared mailbox.
With the right tool, you’ll be able to manage customer queries, and prospect inquiries and maximize efficiency quickly.
But before that, it is necessary to know what is a shared mailbox or team inbox and why we need to have a shared mailbox.
A shared mailbox (also known as a Shared Inbox, Common Inbox, or Team Inbox) is a tool that helps several sales reps in a sales team have all their outreach communication happening in one common inbox.
All permitted team members can access, read, and respond to any communication received from a recipient (prospect or candidate).
A team member can send an email from a shared inbox and have the message appear to come from the team member’s email address. The same applies to emails received in the common inbox; the team is aware of the team member who has received the email.
The shared mailbox helps maintain transparency within a business team. Team members and sales leaders are aware of all communications with recipients. In this way, no email or message a client sends goes unnoticed.
Shared Inbox tools help business teams manage and engage with more clients or candidates efficiently.
Additionally, the tools allow team managers to track the communication of team members, and tasks completed by their team, manage their team’s workflow, and re-allocate leads if the need arises (lets you are on leave, your lead inquiry could be managed by your colleague).
Here are five reasons business teams should invest in a shared mailbox or common inbox:
- Shared inbox tools help sales reps work together and collaborate well as a team.
- All the team’s activities are recorded in one place. This ensures no prospect’s messages go unread. Thus, helping teams stay on top of their tasks.
- Increased collaboration and teamwork help increase the team’s productivity, and reduce the sales inquiry response time, thereby improving the company’s ROI.
- Shared mailbox tools help track and maintain quality and SLA standards
- The tool further helps avoid team conflict over the onus of prospects.
Shared inbox software is made available as standalone software or as a collaborative feature with larger sales engagement platforms similar to SmartReach.io
We all know handling email is relatively easy only when you are dealing with only a few prospects, but as your business grows, this job becomes challenging. The chances of cross-communication by various team members with one prospect also increase.
This causes problems like misplaced emails, forgotten conversations, duplicated responses, and emails to the wrong people. An email inbox tool provides a solution that helps all team members work together efficiently and effectively.
- A shared inbox helps create accountability, meaning specific emails can be assigned to specific team members, ensuring transparency.
- Increase team efficiency and productivity: Shared inbox tools carry features like tags and custom fields which help to keep communication organized.
- Reduced business or sales cycles. The collaborative features help teams with complex sales processes reduce processing and response time.
- With a shared mailbox every team member has its respective login credentials, 2FA, and permission-based roles and responsibilities. Passwords are not shared amongst team members. This helps large agencies and enterprises maintain security standards set by regulators
Shared Mailbox Features
- Automation: Many of the best-shared mailbox tools offer automation features to save your team’s time and effort by automating tasks like sending out follow-up emails or assigning tasks to specific team members.
- Customization: The ability to customize the look and feel of your shared inbox is essential as this will help ensure that it fits in with your existing systems and branding.
- Collaborative Features: Collaboration is critical in managing emails and other communications, so the best-shared mailbox tools will offer features such as task assignment, file sharing, commenting, etc., that make it easy for teams to work together effectively.
- Security: Security should always be a priority when choosing a shared mailbox, so select a tool with robust security protocols.
- Integration: It’s crucial that your chosen tool can integrate with other applications, such as project management software or customer relationship management (CRM) systems so that all your data is kept in sync across different platforms.
- Reporting & Analytics: Reporting and analytics features allow you to track performance over time and identify areas where improvement is needed to increase efficiency.
- Mobile Accessibility: Mobile accessibility is increasingly important as more people access their emails via mobile devices. Make sure your chosen shared mailbox allows you to access their emails from anywhere.
- Scalability: As your business expands, you require more storage space or additional features, so choose a tool that can scale up quickly with minimal disruption to your workflow.
- Pricing: Last but not least, pricing should always be considered when choosing a shared inbox software – ensure you get the best value for money possible!
SmartReach.io
SmartReach is an intuitive and user-friendly sales engagement platform designed to help businesses of all sizes streamline their cold outreach efforts. With SmartReach, you can easily create and send personalized communications to your target audience, validate email ids, generate spam test reports, automate follow-ups, track engagement metrics, and much more.
The platform offers multichannel capabilities, which enable outreach through various channels such as email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, SMS, and calls. By utilizing a range of channels, sales representatives can extend their reach to a wider audience and enhance their chances of connecting with potential customers.
One of the features of SmartReach is its shared inbox functionality, which allows multiple team members to access and manage email conversations from a single, centralized platform. It’s used mainly by sales teams, recruitment teams and customer support teams.
Pros:
- Transparency across the team, where each team member would have access to view all the incoming emails.
- Improvement in team communication and collaboration
- The sales queries from the prospect would be resolved much faster
- The reply sentiment feature would help monitor the health of the sales pipeline
- Separate categorization of prospect and non-prospect emails would ensure that prospect’s emails are never missed out
- Multiple email ids can be accessed from a single shared inbox which would prevent sales reps from logging in and out multiple times.
- It provides ease of switching between multiple clients from a single place.
- Sales managers can assign ownership to the team members in case of positive sales inquiry.
- A shared inbox eliminates the chance of sending duplicate emails to prospects.
- Sales Leaders can track the performance of the team members.
Cons:
Although SmartReach’s shared inbox doesn’t have any cons, but it lacks certain features such as a draft folder, the ability to mark an email as important, and the option to add internal notes for the conversation.
Fortunately, these features will soon be added to the shared inbox, enhancing its capabilities even further.
Pricing:
SmartReach’s basic plan starts from $29 billed monthly. The amount is inclusive of prospecting software, email verification software, spam test reports, cold email software, detailed reporting and Shared Inbox. This means for a few dollars extra you can get so much more.
The front is a client communication center that surrounds every critical discussion with team collaboration tools and contextual data to guarantee that responses are always prompt, precise, and intensely personalized.
This shared mailbox software is best for sales reps looking to manage multiple channels from a single interface.
Pros:
Front helps SDRs manage multiple channel outreach platforms. The best thing is that it has got to integrate with over 50+ apps.
Cons:
Some people might need help with the interface and require instructions.
Pricing:
Front starts at $19 per month billed annually for smaller teams.
Gmelius enables email collaboration, project management, and process automation within Gmail, Google Workspace, and beyond.
Gmelius offers a unique collaboration platform that connects with the rest of your everyday apps, starting with strong shared inboxes, visual Kanban boards, and intelligent workflow automation directly inside Gmail. Utilize our special 2-way connectors (including Slack and Trello), the public API, or Zapier to link your preferred tools.
Pros:
– Simplify email management
– Increase transparency and accountability
– Monitor and distribute your workload visually
Cons:
There are numerous glitches and bugs in the tool, according to users.
Pricing: Starts at $12/user per month billed annually
GrooveHQ shared mailbox tool is one of the best tools for small and big enterprises looking for an easy switch to a shared inbox solution.
Pros:
GrooveHQ has got more than 30 + integration apps. It also allows you to pull real-time insights in just one click.
Cons:
GrooveHQ might not benefit teams looking for one shared inbox tool for a different department in the organization (such as sales, marketing, finance, etc)
Pricing:
It starts at $20 per user per month billed annually.
Hiver shared inbox tools is one of the best shared inbox tools for sales teams using Gmail.
The Hiver shared mailbox extension has remarkable features like private notes enabling team collaborations. You may not know that its collision detection feature helps members avoid responding to the same email twice.
It is the best tool for the team that wants to manage shared inbox tools within Gmail.
Pros:
Easy to set and use
Cons:
Hiver only works for Gmail users and does not support other email interfaces.
Pricing:
The pricing plan starts at 800 INR per user per month.
Drag
Drag is another essential tool for sales teams wanting project management capabilities. For groups using Google Workspace, Drag is another choice besides Hiver.
Hiver and Drag are extensions that work on your current Gmail account.
Drag has all your standard shared mailbox features like email assignments, tagging, @mentions, shared drafts, and collision detection. It also has a team chat feature for easy collaboration with teammates.
Drag’s strengths in project management are a crucial difference. Users may quickly manage their tasks, checklists, and emails by selecting between list views or visual Kanban boards.
It is the best tool for an organization that needs to collaborate and work on multiple projects occasionally.
Pros:
In Drag shared inbox tools, teams can collaborate without disturbance because of the feature of internal chat that helps teams to work together without any hassles. It’s a brilliant tool for managing tasks and organizing your team’s effort.
Cons:
The first-time user at Drag could find the interface to be complicated.
Pricing:
Start at $5 per user per month, billed annually
Loop Email is a simple yet effective team inbox tool. For groups used to processing customer messages via email, it is simple to set up and use because it was developed with the familiarity of an email.
Loop simplifies and consolidates your incoming work communication into a single inbox, restoring order, control, and focus for you and your team. Mid-level organizations, this tool is best for you!
Pros:
Loop organizes your inbox in contacts, is easier to navigate, and easily converts emails into team chat conversations.
Cons:
The software can be complicated. Hence sales teams will need thorough training on using Loop.
Pricing:
This tool starts at €15 per user per month, billed annually.
Missive is one of the best-shared mailbox tools for team collaboration.
This shared mailbox tool allows sales reps to bring all their business emails — individual and shared accounts — into a single workspace. The unified inbox can handle email, social media messages, and live chat. The platform has various features like canned responses, conversation assignments, shared labels, and rule-based automation to make handling contacts easier.
It is one of the best tools for small and medium businesses, consulting firms, and marketing agencies.
Pros:
It allows you to access multiple email accounts from a unified interface with plenty of integrations.
Cons:
It’s an app to manage different email accounts and not just a shared inbox.
Pricing:
The pricing starts at 14$ per month per user.
Kayako
Kayako is a simple customer support tool that boosts team productivity and fosters client loyalty. In contrast to historical support technologies, Kayako connects your multichannel conversations and client information, enabling you to provide team-based customer service while maintaining a personal touch.
This shared inbox tool is best for customer support teams and organizations looking to power their customer service.
Pros:
Canned responses and multichannel customer interactions from a unified dashboard.
Cons:
It isn’t suitable for other teams in your company, such as finance, marketing, or sales, since it is designed especially for customer support.
Pricing:
Kayako has a free trial period and then starts at $30 per user per month
Helpmonk has built a unified solution for all features of email marketing. This includes customer management, email marketing, and marketing automation. Helpmonk ensures that all the team members are on the same page. Moreover, Helpmonk offers email delegation and alerts teams if an email is unattended.
Pros:
Allow several SDRs to respond to emails at once without worrying about the collision.
Cons:
Users have complained about the platform’s slow speed, reliability and bugs.
Pricing:
You can test Helpmonk for 30 days free, then subscribe to its shared mailbox package for $29 per month (unlimited users).
Wrapping it Up!
Shared inbox or mailbox software offers an excellent way for teams to collaborate and manage their contact. SDRs no longer have to worry about important information getting drowned in silos. Your customer emails will never go unnoticed again. Sales reps can automate repetitive tasks like email assignments and avoid duplication.
While there are many shared inbox tools to choose from, pin down the best according to your business’s needs.
