Switching From Gmail to Relenta (Cautiously)

Written by Bernard Lunn / February 16, 2009 3:30 PM / 37 Comments

About 6 months ago, I switched from Outlook to Gmail and wrote about the experience. It was a move I haven't regretted, and I've never been tempted to return to Outlook. Despite a few glitches in the matrix that occur when Gmail goes down, the service is as close to "free, perfect, and now" as it gets. So, why am I spending time switching to an email service by an unknown start-up called Relenta?

In a more recent post looking at the evolution of tools for sales, I expressed my frustration not so much with Gmail but with having to integrate multiple work and productivity tools. This prompted Dmitry of Relenta to contact me, and he has been "relentless" in helping me switch to Relenta. In this post, I'll document my early experience with the process.

Why Consider Yet Another Webmail Tool?

Dmitry probably has a hard time getting attention for Relenta. What could be more boring than yet another webmail system? He got my attention, though, by claiming that Relenta would reclaim one hour of my day by making my routine work more productive. From my first look at Relenta, this looks possible (but far from certain -- these are still very early days).

The short of it is that Relenta has email at its core, but it is a lot more than email. Actually, any corporate type who has "lived in" Outlook for years already has something like this. Outlook/Exchange is a lot more than email, too, except it is tied to the PC.

SaaS tools have done well by being simple. But integration eventually becomes the pain point. And integration does not simply mean a bit of middleware that integrates data. Nor does it mean a suite with basic levels of integration. There has to be some UI magic that makes it all look simple.

The deciding factor for me was my need for a basic CRM. Would a simple low-cost product like Zoho or SugarCRM do the trick? Or perhaps something hacked together from Gmail and related tools? The reality was that email would remain the core of my daily work, so adding CRM capability would mean having the following:

Contact manager: contact groups, contact-specific filters, follow-up management.
Task manager: to-do lists, follow-ups, prioritizing, all around getting-things-done capability.
Calendar: which is essential to task management.
Really simple email marketing automation: auto-responders, lists, canned responses.
File management: quick and easy document attachments.

Relenta claims that "it takes just one click from any screen within Relenta to respond to emails, update contact information, add calendar events, or create to-do lists."

From a few days of use, it looks like Relenta does this fairly well. It's not perfect yet, but switching to a new system is like moving into a new home: it has to at least be good enough at first, and you have to be confident that you can rip out the ugly linoleum without destroying the house or your budget.

I saw enough positive reviews to be convinced that Relenta is for real. This survey by SalesTeamTools was particularly helpful:

"Email-Centered Contact Management Software ****½

"With an update to our review of online contact managers, we introduce Relenta. But this is a whole new world. Just to get you setup and running, Relenta requires a pretty web- and techno-savvy person. But if you can get that squared away within your company, or through your computer-neighbor down the street, you'll become addicted to the features Relenta offers.

"Relenta is really an email management and marketing system, all wrapped inside a solid online contact management program. It can free you from using Outlook or any other email client, consolidates all your incoming and outgoing email by tying each to a contact in your database, and includes killer email/newsletter marketing features. You can also share emails, contacts and contact-based notes across a team.

"It is a powerhouse: it's feature-packed and offers far more than typical contact management. But it's also not for the faint of heart. It takes quite a bit of time to fully appreciate the concept, to get setup and to get used to operating.

"But if you're in this for the long haul, and you want more than a glorified address book, set aside some time and give Relenta a try. Relenta offers plans for $20 or $25 per month per user."

My experience so far echoes the review. And that is why I am switching -- cautiously.

Why Cautiously?

Here are two reasons:

The services are mission critical for me and too important to mess up.
Relenta is a small start-up. It could fail or mess up.

And here is how I am hedging my bets:

I still have Gmail. This is a standard parallel-run implementation and is how I made my transition from Outlook to Gmail. I never had to go back to Outlook. Now, email to my Gmail account is simply forwarded to my Relenta account.
All CRMs and contact managers take some effort to get the best out of them. I am investing this effort bit by bit. For example, I have taken the trouble to group and tag one set of contacts. If that enables me to be more productive in that area, I will invest time in other areas.

Personal Tool or Group Tool?

Relenta is more useful when your colleagues use it as well, because then it allows you to avoid the endless rounds of email forwarding and lengthy mail lists and threads. Your work categories and contact tags can also be used by colleagues. But persuading my colleagues, who are less email-obsessed than I am, to make the switch at the same time would have been too hard. So, my test was whether I could reasonably improve my productivity while keeping it only as a personal tool.

Outlook/Exchange has a similar issue. You can use Outlook as a personal tool, but there are bigger benefits when the whole company uses Exchange. In the old days, somebody in IT told you what to use. Today, individuals can make more decisions and get colleagues to buy in gradually.

How Fast Will Relenta Innovate to Create the Ideal Tool?

Relenta is working on two fronts that are important to me:

Easy integration with social media. Following email threads is fine, and viewing all email communication with one contact is good. But what if the communication you're looking for happened on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Skype?
Native Blackberry integration. Specifically Blackberry, not the iPhone. Relenta appeals to people who like Outlook, and those people tend to have Blackberrys. And I'm not just talking about a mobile browser version either, which is easy, but integration with native Blackberry tools. That's hard. Relenta at least views this as a priority.

I'll report on my progress with Relenta in follow-up posts or in comments to this post. I would love to get feedback from people who have experience, good or bad, with Relenta.

Comments

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ZZZZZzzzzzzzz....

Posted by: km4 | February 16, 2009 4:47 PM

Hi Bernard,

Thanks for the tip. I've posted up a request for more information on my particular use-case on their forums, I'll see how I get on with them.

OOB.

Posted by: outofband | February 16, 2009 4:50 PM

Bernard,

The, I think, obvious comparison which you've not explored here is between Relenta and the Gmail/Salesforce combo.

While you may not be in a position to comment from experience, I'd like to know if for many, the Gmail/Salesforce "thing" has proven to be a really good solution.

Certainly, the pricing or relenta means that it's on a (kind of) par with Salesforce.

Nice that Relenta is a clean all-in-one deal, but how can you beat the force.com platform for customization, etc??

Thoughts from others? Follow-up article RRW??

-Alister

Posted by: Alister Cameron | February 16, 2009 4:56 PM

Relenta is killing itself by not offering a free plan. A two week trial doesn't cut it.

Posted by: jd | February 16, 2009 8:59 PM

Something between Yahoo Mail and Gmail

Posted by: Mehmet Ali | February 17, 2009 12:03 AM

@jd, we do have a permanently free plan. Look for the link under the monthly plans on http://www.relenta.com/pricing.html

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta | February 17, 2009 12:24 AM

Relenta and HighriseHQ both prove there is a market beyond SalesForce dot com.

Posted by: Engago Team | February 17, 2009 12:57 AM

@outofband, your response is ready here.

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta | February 17, 2009 2:23 AM

Yawn. Give me a break, just try Gmail for Domains and use contacts shared.

Posted by: Mark | February 17, 2009 2:46 AM

@Mark: Keep on yawning. Ignorance is bliss :)

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta | February 17, 2009 3:12 AM

Looks like a paid post to me. No offense. At $300 a year, I would never switch to Relanta.

Gmail is way too good (free).

Posted by: Vaibhav | February 17, 2009 3:50 AM

Thanks # 1 (funny name, KM4), I plan to apply to FDA to get my posts approved as an alternative to Ambien. Then I will be rich enough not to accept paid posts as implied by Vaibhav (#11). No offense taken, but your wrong.

# 5, Mehmet, I have heard good things about Yahoo mail, that it is Outlook like. But what I really needed was CRM-lite - see below - don't think they do that (maybe wrong).

CRM-lite is really the key issue for me. If I had said "why I am using Relenta rather than Salesforce.com, Zoho or SugarCRM" it would not have upset Gamil fans. I was not trying to be negative about Gmail. I have been and remain a big Gmail fan. I was extremely reluctant to switch. But I had real needs and so was motivated to at least take a look.

After using Relenta I can see Email ++ = CRM-lite. And that's what I need. Its horses for courses, your needs will be different.

I have seen two suggestions for keeping Gmail and adding CRM-lite:

* Google for Domains + Shared Contacts. I will take another look at that. This is the best thread I found on this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=7989bc81c28dbf64&hl=en

But sharing is only one part of it. The other stuff I was looking for was only in CRM services.

* Gmail + Salesforce.com. They have integrated and partner. I would like feedback from people who use this combo. My worry was complexity.

The two routes are very different - its one or the other - and from what I can see Relenta was an interesting and practical mid-point between those two.

Posted by: Bernard Lunn | February 17, 2009 4:56 AM

Thanks for sharing. I just signed up for the free plan and am curious how it will work.

Posted by: Regine | February 17, 2009 5:21 AM

I'm giving the 2 week a try. I still don't get all the gmail love? I have been screaming for something that will save me time working within that system. Of all other systems I've looked at, so far, I'm impressed w/ Relenta's ease of use and overall integration of tasks. I'm interested to see upcoming upgrades too.

Posted by: Linda S | February 17, 2009 12:11 PM

You wrote:
"Here are two reasons:
- The services are mission critical for me and too important to mess up.
- Relenta is a small start-up. It could fail or mess up."

I disagree with your reasoning. One of the reasons I use Relenta is precisely because it is a small company. Relenta is Relenta's only product. If they mess up, they're dead. Dmitri knows this. If he drops the ball on any number of his customers the tsunami of angry blog posts will really hurt his revenues.

Google can drop the ball on a number of gmail users with no effect on its bottom line. They have screwed up before. Same thing with google apps for domains. What's in it for them to provide the very best possible service to 100.00% of their users when it's free and they dominate the net anyways?

Don't get me wrong, I monitored Relenta's progress for a long time before jumping in completely. But I am now sure that Dmitri is putting together a serious business and a seriously good product.

Posted by: Olivier F | February 17, 2009 12:14 PM

Linda, Olivier: Thanks so much!

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta | February 18, 2009 1:52 AM

Features look very promising, but I have one huge concern that is killing my interest in trying this out.

After a 14-day free trial, it's $25/month/person. Not only does the outflow bother me, but it will be a huge obstacle to the company's need to ramp up to the critical mass for success. Getting on (and becoming dependent on) a likely-to-sink ship is not a good use of my resources. (The "permanently free" plan is a nice start, but I'd crash into the limit of 100 contacts in about 25 minutes. If they're wooing the "I want productivity" crowd, this is a non-starter.)

Other tech startups are well capitalized enough to start free and offer premium services later (witness Google, after all). If they fix this, I'd strongly consider it and, like you, be likely to tell everyone I know. The lack of integration in Gmail between e-mail, calendar and contact management is killing me.

But for now, no.

Posted by: Roz | February 18, 2009 7:05 AM

@Roz, thanks for the candid feedback. I am sure you didn't mean "likely-to-sink ship" the way it sounds.

We are bootstrapping our way to the critical mass and quite successfully so. We are indeed considering lowering the price in the future.

In the meantime, the productivity gains any business realizes from Relenta far outweigh $25 per month. Don't take my word for it, hear it from our users:

http://relenta.com/customers.html

I talk to clients all day and every one of them is telling me that Relenta is a huge bargain for what they're getting.

You can calculate what information overload is costing you here:

http://www.iocalculator.com

Post your results here? Thanks!

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta | February 18, 2009 8:08 AM

I've got the same interests in CRM, but I don't think the solution is reinventing webmail (again). Gmail's got a pretty solid start in that department.

I've been doing the Gmail/Highrise combo for a while now, and I've found that to be most powerful combination, after previously trying salesforce, sugar, relanta, tacticle, heap, etc, etc, etc

Posted by: Evan | February 18, 2009 9:52 AM

@Relenta - you could be right about savings for big business. I'm small business and don't quantify productivity on that large a scale. The risk to me is lost investment in learning curve time. Sorry "likely-to-sink" is so snarky, but speed to large installed user base is often a solid predictor of longevity, and your pricing makes me a bit concerned. Hope I'm wrong.

Posted by: Roz | February 18, 2009 11:10 AM

Ignorance is bliss and users "don't know what they don't know".

A good CRM is worth its weight in gold, so I don't think the price point is too high. Also, its tough to say you don't want the "ship to sync", when you're not willing to pay for it.

In the end I'll say that I'm paying for Highrise by 37Signals for $49/mo for my company, and I'm about to get a personal subscription for myself. I never thought I'd pay for something like this ,but the need for better management of contacts is real, and Facebook/Gmail/Linkedin/ are not doing a good job.

I'm interested in seeing if Relenta makes the cut, but for now the only system that has come close to passing the ROI test for me is Highrise. With minimal effort and minimal data entry I can track a decent amount of stuff about my contacts.

Would love to see what other people are doing...

P.S. I also think http://www.soocial.com/ , if it can build solid syncing, will be a killer tool in this space

Posted by: Evan | February 18, 2009 11:30 AM

"Ignorance is bliss and users "don't know what they don't know."

Amen!

"Relenta solves the problem I didn't know we had" - I hear it all the time.

Posted by: Dmitri Eroshenko, Relenta | February 18, 2009 12:43 PM

We’ve been running Relenta since October 2008. Before moving to Relenta, we trialed the following: FreeCRM, BroswerCRM, JobBlogs, iContact, Joyent, HyperOffice, Webex (WebOffice), vTiger, ZoHo, Zimbra, Chaos Intellect, StreetSmart, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Google’s CRM (Etelos), SalesForce, Infusionsoft, and a few others. 17 different trials ranging from 14 to 30 days.

Relenta IS the cleanest and nicest solution to group productivity and CRMing. This is NOT just shared email (yawn)--this is "micro CRM," and very well done.

Client service from Dimitri and his team is outstanding!

I’m happy to act as a reference for Relenta for anyone still unconvinced.

Posted by: Ken Jones | February 26, 2009 12:40 PM

I got the demo from Dmitri and was very impressed.

I'm personally using gmail and highrise (a lite CRM from 37 Signals), because I'm too hooked on gmail to leave it. For a business that is new to CRM and wants a CRM-lite, I would recommend this. The learning curve isn't too high, and its structured enough to encourage best practices.

You could go with a clunky software setup (sugar, salesforce), and force your team to use it, but I think with something like this they'll go much more willingly.

Posted by: evbart | February 26, 2009 4:34 PM

I actually just switched to Outlook, and I love it because of Outlook Track-It. It looks like your average toolbar-addon but it actually flags any email you want, for followup reminders. So, I never forget to follow up now. It's recommended.

Posted by: CJW | February 28, 2009 3:23 PM

Most people have more than one email address, so it's natural that most people use different email web apps (ie. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), but what's not so obvious is that these new tools seem to forget that "email is people."

We've all had that email exchange.

You've purchased something, it's not the right size, color, style and you contact customer service to see how to return it and you wait.

And wait.

You get an automatic response email telling you that your business is important to the company. So important that it's a full five days before you get a REAL response. Too bad that response has nothing to do with the question you posed. So you send a reply and the whole process starts over again.
So what's wrong with this picture?

What kind of impression is the company leaving with you? Will it influence you the next time you want to purchase from them?

Of course it will!

There's only so long you can mistreat your customers before they stop coming back for more. "It's just an email" I can hear them say. "Email can wait until we have time." Would you say the same thing if the customer was standing in front of you? "Thanks for coming in, I'll get back to you in a day or two."

That, in essence is what you're doing every time you let that email sit for days and days in your email inbox.

That email is a person. A person asking for your help.

Each email is a person. Every email is a person.

Email is people. And, all CRM is not created equal.

Posted by: Jason Gallic | March 3, 2009 2:28 PM

Gmail keeps me because of it's spam filter and search functionality... how have you found the switch to Relenta with those losses in mind? Obviously, I'd like all the CRM of Relenta with my cake as well.

Posted by: Andrew | March 18, 2009 3:10 AM

First off, let me just introduce myself as a highly-demanding and passionate (yes, fervently so), CRM consultant. I've lost count of the number of desktop and web-based CRMs that I've worked with over the years (starting with Siebel 2000 in year 2000). As a consultant to small business, and a small business owner myself, I am ever-vigilant to find the "Excaliber sword." And as I say to clients all the time, technology is organic and ever-changing. So the following is just a summation of my experiences and opinions.

There is a wide open and currently neglected segment of the market out there. It lies somewhere in between the desktop apps (of huge variety, ranging from simple address books to CRMs) and the enterprise Web/SaaS solutions.

I'll focus on small business here, because that is where my experience and expertise lie, and I also I believe that this is the sweet spot of that aforementioned segment. I will stay focused on web/SaaS, since that is somewhat the topical focus on this conversation thread. There are plenty of excellent client/server desktop CRM solutions for small business, like Daylite and more than a few FileMaker-based solutions, as long as you're willing to assume the responsibility of maintaining a technology infrastructure. I think if you're reading this article and this conversational thread, you "get" the value of the cloud.

Small businesses don't usually have onboard IT, so they outsource it. Small business owners also happen to be more agile and willing to adopt (in fact, seek) the cloud as their backbone, especially when the reliability is high, the functionality is solid, and the cost is either at or below their current client/server/outsourced IT costs. Obviously.

All businesses share these intertwined predicaments: data-capture and business productivity management. Success is found in not only capturing the right data, but then acting on it effectively. We're not talking about pie-in-the-sky charts or pipeline projections, but about who is interested in what, who knows whom, and when to follow up with them next.

So, to serve these needs in the cloud, we have solutions like Highrise, that offer simplicity at its best but fall short of satisfying the true demands of business productivity management. For example, it would be quite difficult to pull up a list of prospects who have not opted out to receive e-mail (and perhaps more stringent criteria), to send a merge e-mail to. If I have to use a complex arrangement of keywords to get a short list of contacts to then have to export to some other software/service to then do the necessary follow-up, what's the point? Then there's BatchBook, which offers greater depth of data capture (the Supertag concept is ingenious), but once again, you can't do merge e-mails without exporting to something else. Also, with both of these solutions, the user must remember to forward/bcc: every e-mail on a real-time basis in order for those communications to be useful to a group/company.

And it goes on...Infusionsoft offers a fairly solid solution, but at a ridiculously-high price point, along with a "guarantee" that would be difficult to substantiate having followed their rules if you were to seek a refund as they advertise. Oprius almost gets it, but they are B2C-focused, and lacks integration.

What the small business market yearns for is the reliability and easy maintenance of the cloud, the simplicity of Highrise, and the power of Infusionsoft, at an affordable price point. That's all. Any takers?

Yes, Relenta. They have innovated and integrated. You don't have to forward/bcc: e-mail, because it comes straight in. I call that being "genius proof." And it's one-click philosophy of putting contextual functionality at your fingertips, is spot on. And at $25 per user per month, it's a bargain vs. a client/server architecture, outsourced IT and off-site backups, etc.

What Relenta lacks in integration with 3rd-party calendaring and address books, it makes up for in providing a unified, simplified, affordable solution (although integration would be nice, and can always be added).

I think Relenta should embrace Google Apps, not compete against it, and offer a "salesforce.com" for the rest of us in small-business land.

Posted by: Scott Gardner | April 14, 2009 12:09 PM

Outlook has been my personal Choice. Yes - I have a gmail address, but outlook makes it so easy to customize. There's also a followup email reminder plugin that you can download right to Outlook called Outlook Track-It. It has helped the flow of e-mails for my business. Great add-on for GTD.

Posted by: Bacarli G | April 28, 2009 5:14 PM

What the small business market yearns for is the reliability and easy maintenance of the cloud, the simplicity of Highrise, and the power of Infusionsoft, at an affordable price point. That's all. Any takers?

Posted by: Designer Handbags | July 31, 2009 2:22 AM

So Bernard... it has been almost 6 months since your post - are you still on Relenta? What's the good, the bad, and the ugly?

Posted by: Walt | July 31, 2009 10:03 AM

Walt, yep, still use it every day to run the biz and find it hard to imagine not having it. Some quirks and things I wish it had, but thats usual with software in my experience. Basically, two thumbs up

Posted by: Bernard Lunn | August 3, 2009 5:52 AM

I just started w/Gmail apps and am realizing the limitations, particularly no shared contacts. I'm looking for solutions, but there are so many options it's dizzying. I've found this discussion extremely helpful (thanks Bernard), but 2 questions to anyone who has input:

1 - Since I'm extremely new to having any sort of integrated system, should I start with the Gmail/Highrise combo that I've seen suggested a few times here and then graduate into something like Relenta, or just skip right on to it? Can anyone speak to pros/cons of each approach?

2 - I didn't see anyone mention Zimbra on here, which is a solution I was told to review. Any comments about it?

Posted by: shannon | August 5, 2009 1:01 PM

As others have said, Relenta is a lot more than email.

* you have contact management
* you have group emails (done intelligently)
* it's all groupware so everyone in your company is on the same page

Relenta is an incredibly powerful tool.

I've been using the same phrase as Bernard: CRM-lite.

BTW, it is possible to integrate Relenta into your business without moving all your email in. You can move just the general business addresses (info@, support@, sales@) and continue to use private mails for the more sensitive parts of a business.

It's also easy to create multiple departments in order to segment different parts of your business or even different businesses.

Like Ken, we did some serious looking around before settling on Relenta: Infusionsoft, SugarCRM, Highrise, Salesforce to name just a few.

None of them come close to touching Relenta for ease of use and simple power (i.e. power your whole team can really use without days of training).

Unlike Infusionsoft or Joyent, Relenta is also lightning fast. I hate slow applications and Relenta feels as fast as a local application. Whoever did the core coding, did a great job.

Posted by: Alec | November 7, 2009 2:22 PM

Thank you for your sharing.!

Posted by: nusret | November 20, 2009 7:33 AM

Bernard,
Thank you for your very informative post. Are you still using it?
I hear good words about Relenta here, but there is one point that does not quite fit the bill. I am looking for B2C. I need to be able to chat with Customers, and suppliers, with up to 4 people bobbing in and out (users) at my end. $100 per month is way to much to pay for this service for me.
Ken Jones list of 17 products is a list I have been going through.
Ticketting systems just dont hack it for the standard B2C ecom site. Will Relenta do you think?

Rupert

Posted by: Penny Shares | January 20, 2010 4:19 AM