Revolutionizing Email Management: SendBoard’s Take on a Team Mailbox
Reimagine your team’s mailbox with Email for Trello by SendBoard. Collaborate, delegate, and – dare we say – celebrate as we take email management to the next level!
SendBoard’s Email for Trello Power-Up brings your team’s emails into Trello, so that you can leverage the organizational power of Trello to get more done. View all emails in a Kanban-style layout and watch emails and associated tasks move through your workflow – all the way from unread to done. It’s super satisfying!
In this article, we show you how to revolutionize your email management with our take on a team mailbox.
What is a team mailbox?
Firstly, let’s understand the team mailbox concept. Teams using a shared inbox work together in the same mailbox to
Send emails
Reply to incoming messages
Collaborate on to-dos related to business comms
A shared mailbox can be useful for all kinds of teams including help desks and customer support, sales and CRM, and bookings and reservations.
But team inboxes in traditional mail clients like Outlook or Gmail can be difficult to navigate. It’s not always clear who’s responsible for which emails or how far along work is in the pipeline, and informal workarounds like using ‘mark unread’ to flag a conversation for follow-up can be messy and confusing. This is where Email for Trello comes in!
Why set up a team mailbox in Trello?
Managing your team mailbox directly from Trello allows you to use Trello’s powerful organizational features for your emails.
This solves a host of problems! Working with email on your Trello board makes it easy to:
Automate sending emails. Send emails based on custom triggers with Trello’s no-code automation builder, freeing up time for more important stuff.
Streamline your email processes. View your entire workflow at a glance with Trello’s visual Kanban layout.
Collaborate on emails. Use Trello’s assign and comment functions to delegate and discuss work.
We take a look at each of these benefits in more detail below.
TIP For a practical deep-dive into using email in Trello our step-by-step guide to managing business workflows shows you how to set up and maintain a shared inbox in Trello.
Automate sending emails
Automation is a powerful no-code tool that’s built right into Trello, perfect for standardizing your emails and scaling your communication. Here are just a few ways to use it to your team’s advantage:
Share templates between team members. Standardize comms and eliminate errors with Saved Replies. A bit of time spent building out a library of template responses will save your team lots of time later down the line!
Manage customer expectations. A good auto-reply provides accurate information on your team’s response time and, by providing further help information, can often resolve queries without the need for you to get involved! Learn how to set up an auto-reply in our help center.
Save time spent on emails. Automatically send emails based on triggers in your workflow, so that you can spend time on more important things! For example, you can drag a Trello card to send an email or set up automations to take care of your weekly email tasks. Check out our help center to learn more about how to set up and use email automations in Trello.
TIP Need some prompts for writing great emails? We have 70+ email templates to help you out! Just copy and adapt for your business scenario.
For more ideas on how to use automation in Trello, take a look at our top 10 ways to transform your workflow with automation.
Streamline your email processes
Unnecessary marketing emails and notifications can clutter up your inbox, but forwarding email to Trello and managing your team mailbox there ensures that only relevant emails come through into your workflow. In your Email for Trello settings, simply set up a forwarding rule to redirect emails from your chosen shared inbox (e.g. sales@ or help@), right through to Trello!
If you want even more granular control over which emails to send to your Trello board, you can create advanced filters to match certain subject lines or emails from specific email addresses. Learn more about filter matching for Gmail and Outlook in our help center.
Email notifications in Trello look a little different from regular mail clients, helping you and your team to keep tabs on your workflow:
New emails are created as new Trello cards at the top of your ‘inbox’ list. (You can choose which Trello list receives incoming mail in your Email for Trello settings.)
Email replies are shown in your Trello notification panel, and you’ll also see the red bell icon on the card. (Note that cards don’t move back to your inbox list when you get a reply, as that might mess around with your workflow or interfere with automations on your board.)
TIP You can set up additional email reply notifications in Trello, customized to your team. For example, when a new email comes in, set a label on the card or move it to the top of the current list. Learn more about custom email reply notifications in our help center.
Collaborate on emails
Managing your team emails in Trello is ideal for collaboration, visibility of tasks, and continuity of support when someone is out of office or unavailable.
With the Email for Trello Power-Up, emails arrive as new cards on your Trello board, which can then be dealt with available team members. Trello has flexible options for delegating work, including:
Assign work by adding team members to a Trello card
Distinguish to-dos by color with Trello card labels
Group cards by team member using the Swimlanes Power-Up
💡 Did you know? You can even set up an automation to assign work to colleagues in a round-robin!
Each team member is then free to work on their own to-dos – but the key factor is that everyone’s activity is highly transparent. All back and forth email correspondence is saved to the Trello card, and any contextual information like attachments, notes or team discussion via comments is also right there for future reference. This means that if anyone is sick or on leave, the team is able to pick things up easily, ensuring a seamless experience for the client.
Plus, Email for Trello’s contact management dashboard gives team leads greater visibility on correspondence. Contextual contact notes and a real-time activity feed make it easier to stay in the loop with an accurate overview of ongoing comms and work.
TIP If you receive an email in your personal inbox that relates to a work to-do, you can use the Trello email to board function to send it to your workspace as a new card. But the Email for Trello email to card feature goes one step further. By forwarding the email with the Trello card reference number in the subject line, you can attach the conversation to an existing email card in Trello, keeping everything together in one place!
Take action on email
Send email from Trello and revolutionize your team's email management with the Email for Trello Power-Up by SendBoard. Collaborate seamlessly, streamline processes, automate tasks, and take your team’s email productivity to a new level!
