Salesforce acquired Email/CRM startup

Social Email plug-ins have become a hot topic. And as a result - the increasing interest towards them from the large vendors and investors. The most well-known representative of this class - Xobni was actually acquired by Cisco. Rapportive recently received the $1 million investment. The other day it found out that RIM (Blackberry) is going to acquire Gist. And yesterday, Salesforce bought for $6 million another similar service - Etacts. As all above mentioned tools, Etacts can pull contact profile data from public social networks and display it in email-client - so it acts as a the social CRM. But besides that, it lets you send personalized email-campaigns, display the history of communications with certain person and remind you when you need to contact him. How does it do it?

Etacts connects to your email-client (currently only to GMail) and analyzes message headers (email, date and subject). Based on this information, it creates a visual history of relations with each contact:

- When the correspondence began

- The history of conversations

- The total number of emails sent to each other

- How often you used to communicate with this person

- How many days have passed since the last contact



Moreover, Etacts can be connected to your smartphone and include phone calls to this interaction history

If you didn't contact with a certain person for a long time, Etacts reminds you about it. You can set a reminder for each contact (e.g. remind if there were no communication during one month).

It also turned out that the GMail email-tracker - EmailOracle (which allows you to keep track of whether the recipient has read your message) - is also developed by Etacs and now it also became a part of Salesforce.

See also: Top 10 Online CRM software