Email for History

I recently posted about using Gmail as an email history resource, and it works really well with a field in each contact/prospect record with the URL to the search.  However, some would immediately recoil, thinking about having to get that URL into every record in their CRM databases.

Well, it’s really easy, especially if you’re just getting started and about to import your records for the first time.  Once you have a .csv comma delimited export from your current system:

• Open the file as a spreadsheet
• Create a column and copy down all of the URL that’s common to every search, in Google it looks like this:  https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/
• After the last / is where the name of the contact is when you do a search as in:  https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/firstname+lastname
• You should have two columns for names of contacts, one for first name and one for last name.  If not, do a “text-to-column” data split to get them from the whole name.
• So, what you do is to create a column with a “+” replicated all the way down for every row.  Then you do a Concatenate command like this:  =concatenate(URL cell, FirstName cell, +Cell, LastName cell).  In other words, you’re telling this new cell and column to merge the data from four other columns, the URL common part, then first name, then the “+”, then last name.  You’ll end up with the complete URL for every record’s name in a column which you can then import right in with all of the rest of them.

You don’t even need to worry about whether you’ve ever traded emails with them, as the Gmail search will just turn up “nothing found” if that’s the case.  I got hundreds in all at once for one client.