Connecting your inbox to HubSpot turns HubSpot into your email communications co-pilot! Here's how.
First, let's start with a handy video to walk you through the process:
The steps to connect your HubSpot account to your email inbox are simple.
- Click the gear icon in the top right of your HubSpot screen
- Select the "General" tab in the left navigation panel, under "Your Preferences"
- Click the "Email" tab in the center section of your HubSpot screen
- Click the orange button that reads "Connect Personal Email"
- Click the "turn on inbox automations" tick box. This will enable you to send and schedule email from within HubSpot, log email replies to HubSpot automatically, and log follow-up tasks and contact details from right inside your email.
- Click "Connect Your Inbox"
- Enter your primary email address (you can connect other email aliases in a different setup step)
- HubSpot will auto-identify your email system.
- Click "Connect to Gmail." If you are using a lesser-known email system, you may need to click "I want to choose my email provider myself."
- Click "Continue" on the disclosures screen
- HubSpot will initiate the connection process.
- You may see a "Choose an account" screen if you regularly use multiple email addresses
- You may see a permissions screen.
- Complete the steps necessary to give HubSpot permissions to your email system.
- HubSpot will create the connection and do a verification process
- After the connection has been made, if you are using Gmail or a Microsoft email system, you will get a popup screen to download the HubSpot extension for your email. Download! This is a very helpful extension that will allow HubSpot to nest inside your email, making it easy to add tasks and customer notes.
- You're done!
Video Transcript
[00:00:01.00]
In order to take advantage of HubSpot features that allow you to do one-to-one emails and record conversations and all of your emails with your contacts and companies, and send sales sequences, which are one-on-one sales automations from HubSpot, you need to connect your personal email. And this is how HubSpot helps you get to a single source of truth about all of your customers and contacts.
[00:00:33.19]
One caveat, though, before we begin, this is not a replacement for your personal email system. Sometimes people think, "Oh, I'll start managing all my email from HubSpot." Hubspot doesn't give you an email management environment like Gmail or Outlook. It integrates email from your email system and attaches all of those emails dynamically to the correct contact record. It also gives you some great integration integration tools between your email and HubSpot to make your work even more efficient. We'll come back to those integrations next.
[00:01:08.20]
But first, within HubSpot, sometimes people are confused when they see this thing called an Inbox, and they think, Oh, that's my new email Inbox. This Inbox is strictly for shared email, like support@yourdomain.com or specific email addresses you have set up for service pipelines and help desks. That's what this Inbox is about.
[00:01:33.01]
Your personal inbox is going to remain your Gmail or Outlook or other email account. But when you connect it, then the email that you send your contacts will all get recorded straight to that contact's record. Okay, so now that we've given you that bit of a disclaimer, let's go in and show you how easy it is to connect your email to HubSpot.
[00:01:56.13]
You're going to go to the settings gear that's in the top navigation bar. Once you get to settings, go to General. You'll see these tabs here under general. Email is your second tab. And to connect your personal email, simply click the connect box. DO turn on Inbox automation. This is where you get a tremendous amount of HubSpot support for managing your communications and logging them to the correct places. Click the box that says connect your email account, and then hit next. It's going to automatically recognize if you are using Gmail or Outlook as your email provider. Then you'll get a button that says either connect to Gmail or connect to Outlook. It will walk you through a few permission and connection steps.
[00:02:50.08]
Just agree to all the services so that the connection can be completed. It will send a test email for you and confirm that the email is connected, and you'll get to this confirmation screen. Once you get there, make sure you download the extension. It's a Chrome or a Firefox extension, and it will allow you to then integrate with your personal email inbox effectively.
[00:03:19.05]
But what if you don't use Gmail or Outlook? Then you will need to take some extra steps to connect. Again, make sure you turn on that Inbox automation, Connect your Inbox. It's going to tell you it can't identify your email provider, and you're going to need to choose an email provider, and then you'll select Other Email Provider. Or if you're using more legacy forms of Microsoft Outlook, particularly Exchange, then you may need to use those options if HubSpot did not recognize your email. When you use one of these options, you will probably need some support from your IT Department, because you're going to have technical requirements related to connecting to these email addresses.
[00:04:04.11]
All right, once your personal email is connected, the next thing you want to do is hit Edit Email Signature and add your personal name, title, logo, whatever your company advises that you use as a signature. That way, whenever you send one-to-one emails, or if you have a paid sales seat and you're triggering sales sequences, which are sales automations, they will always be signed personally by you.
[00:04:29.15]
If you didn't click the Download Email extension, as I mentioned earlier, you could do it here, and you can also manage your extension settings from here.
[00:04:43.02]
Now, let's take a look at the email integrations that I told you about. Here you can see I've got a little HubSpot sprocket at the top of my Gmail account. That is that email extension that I encouraged you to set up. Then here, if you're getting an email from someone you've never gotten an email from before, you could click "Add to HubSpot" from the top of the email. You can also open the HubSpot sprocket (and this looks a little bit different in Outlook, but they both have a lot of the same features). If you click this sprocket, you'll get a running sidebar of HubSpot features next to your email. When you reply to an email, you'll see these features show up at the top of your email. In the top right, this is going to tell you that you're logging and tracking that email.
[00:05:40.17]
That's that email inbox automation I was talking about. But also here, any templates, meetings, tasks, sales sequences, snippets, anything you've got loaded up in HubSpot, you can actually access from right inside your personal email inbox. And there you go. That's how to integrate your email, personal email, with your HubSpot account.