How to Track Outlook Emails in Dynamics

Tracking emails from your email programme to your CRM isn’t a feature that’s much talked about, but it’s very useful. Microsoft Dynamics 365 lets you track either all or selected Outlook emails to contact, lead, account records and more.

Why track emails?

For any business which wants to

• Record all communication leading up to a sale
• Share knowledge about leads and contacts among teams
• Have an accurate and auditable log of all business communication
• Have excellent business continuity when staff leave

Then it’s important to track your email correspondence in a shared store – in this case Dynamics 365 Sales

There are two different apps which you can use in Outlook to link emails to Dynamics. They work on both the Outlook app and Outlook on the web (OWA)

➡️ Dynamics 365 app for Outlook and Sales Copilot

Using the Dynamics 365 app for Outlook

Set up

The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook allows you to access Dynamics 365 Sales data directly within Outlook, enabling you to track emails, create new records, view customer insights, and perform other CRM-related tasks without switching between applications.

To deploy the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, in your organisation, follow these steps:

• If you haven’t already, set up server-side synchronisation for emails, appointments, contacts and tasks.
• Set server side synchronisation as the default method for the organisation
• Test and approve each mailbox you want to track in Dynamics. You can do this in bulk, but you’ll need to remember to do this for each new users you get.
• Check each mailbox is successfully set up
• Add the security role Dynamics 365 App for Outlook User to each relevant user
• Roll out the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook app to users
• Again, this can be done in bulk
• Individual users can install the app themselves if they wish

Opening the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

• First, check you have the app installed correctly. In the Outlook app you should see this icon

• In Outlook on the web (OWA) you should see this icon

The first time you use the app, you’ll be asked to sign in. This should only happen once as long as you use the app regularly

The app behaves like a slimmed down version of Dynamics. Using the search icon and the plus icon, you can find and create new records in Dynamics.

Tracking emails with the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

• First open the email you want to track to Dynamics
• Click the Dynamics 365 icon to open the Dynamics 365 tab (details above)

• In the Set Regarding search box, type the name of the record you wish to track the email to. You can track to
  • Contacts
  • Leads
  • Accounts
  • Opportunities
  • Orders
  • Quotes
  • and most other entities
• When the email is successfully tracked you’ll see this

How to stop tracking an email in Dynamics

• Open the email you wish to stop tracking
• Open the Dynamics 365 tab
• Select the 3 dots menu from the green bar, alongside Tracked regarding
• choose Untrack

From the same menu you can also

• Change the record which the email is linked to
• View the email in Dynamics

Adding a new record with the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

You can create new contacts, leads or accounts from the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

• Open the email which contains the information you’d like to add to Dynamics
• Open the Dynamics 365 tab

• Choose the record type to create

If you’d like the Dynamics 365 tab to remain open for all emails, you can click the pin icon

Using Sales Copilot to track emails to Dynamics

To use Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, you’ll need a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise or Sales Premium subscription

To Install Sales Copilot Outlook Add-in

You’ll need Microsoft 365 administrator privileges to do this.

• Go to Microsoft 365 admin centre – https://admin.microsoft.com/
• Choose Settings > Integrated apps
• In the new window search for Sales Copilot
• Find Sales Copilot for Microsoft Outlook and click Get it now
• Select who you want to deploy the app to (you, your entire team or selected users)

It can take up to 6 hours for the app icon to appear in users’ Outlook app or Outlook web app.

Sales Copilot is correctly installed when you see this icon in the Outlook app

To see the icon in Outlook for the web (OWA), you may have to click Apps (either in the ribbon or at the top of an email) and choose Sales Copilot for Microsoft Outlook

The Sales Copilot for Microsoft Outlook tab will appear on the right of your screen and you may pin it to keep it visible

The first time you use Sales Copilot you may have to log in to your CRM

Tracking emails with Sales Copilot

Sales Copilot has lots of other features

• Summarising email conversations
• Drafting emails for you
• Displaying and analysing previous interactions
• Suggesting follow up actions

Here we’ll focus on linking emails to your CRM

• Open an email in Outlook
• In the Sales Copilot tab you’ll see something similar to this

• If the email sender is not in your CRM, you can add them as a contact.
• If the sender is in your CRM, you can save the email to Dynamics and it will show against their contact record

If you open the Dynamics 365 tab, you can see which records an email is associated with. You can associate an email with

• Contacts
• Accounts
• Opportunities
• Leads

Should I use Sales Copilot or Dynamics 365 app for Outlook?

To install Sales Copilot you need a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise or Sales Premium subscription.

So if you have a Sales Professional licence and you want to track emails, you’ll need to use the Dynamics 365 app, or buy Sales Copilot separately

Broadly speaking, Sales Copilot is much more fully featured, particularly with its AI offer. Some users might find that it currently lacks a wide enough range of entities to track to, but this will change soon.

Microsoft have summarised the differences between the two apps

Automatically Tracking Emails in Dynamics

Dynamics gives you the option to automatically track all emails you send, using the personal settings below.

All email messages
IT admins are often interested in this option as it means much less effort for users and less scope for mistakes. However on consideration, most organisations choose not to use this setting as it will track (and therefore share) all emails including personal HR information, management discussions and all sorts of sensitive information.

Tracking some email messages
You can choose to automatically track

• Email messages in response to a Dynamics 365 email
• Email messages from Dynamics 365 Leads, Contacts and Accounts
• Email messages from Dynamics 365 records that are email enabled

These choices, particularly when combined with the Dynamics 365 app can strike the correct balance between making it easy for users to track important emails and not storing too many or too sensitive emails