How Archiving Old Salesforce Email Improves Storage Efficiency

Your full-sized activity object might only show a few first rows in the view window, but piles of email data are taking a toll on your Salesforce data storage.

In Salesforce, each email received from the customer’s end is reflected in the ‘Email’ tab from the ‘Activity’ object. If the user assigns Email-to-Case, Salesforce logs into the customer emails to automatically transform them into cases or other associated objects in the backend database.

Here, the activity object links the Email Message records to Task records. Emails directly sent from Salesforce are saved as Email Message and Tasks which reside in the default Salesforce data storage space. As your email threads lengthen, the data in Salesforce grows exponentially, highlighting the need for better data management to optimize email object growth.

Every day, your Salesforce inbox receives a volume of email communications through your Sales/Service Console which converts into pipelines for your sales & service agents. Particularly during peak periods like hype cycles, this surge in email traffic is bound to strain the storage capacity of your Salesforce platform if proactive management of data growth is not implemented. 

Let’s understand the challenges of email data growth in Salesforce & how email archiving helps.

Growing Email Volumes Vs the Eternal Struggle of Salesforce Storage Limits

The struggle is real! 70% of platform managers or solutions architects who approached us for Salesforce storage optimization mention struggles with email growth management. Moreover, it has always impacted operations. Especially, businesses with Salesforce CRM licenses over decades will be hoarding years of old data for compliance. Salesforce imposes data storage limits based on the edition and subscription level, with more emails getting piled up over time, The following are the consensuses they faced

• The legacy email data starts competing over Salesforce data storage space
• Application performance is compromised & gets delayed updates
• Emails with multiple attachment files sit in Salesforce file storage space
• It makes it impossible for sales reps or service agents to skim through the chaos
• Maxing out on company’s data storage capacity in Salesforce might restrict users to update or create new records

• Disruption in workflows hindered productivity and led to missed opportunities
• Overcompensate for the situation by paying additional Salesforce data storage costs

Balancing the ever-increasing volume of emails with Salesforce data storage limits is a challenge many businesses face. To address these serial challenges, it’s mandatory to find the eye of the storm, let’s check out the best practices to manage the email influx and improve your Salesforce storage efficiency.

Best Practices to Improve Salesforce Storage Efficiency = Assess, Manage & Archive 

In the most recent release of Salesforce spring tools, automation will be playing a major role in the inflow of Salesforce Inbox. Features like automated data entry will allow you to automatically log in customer emails and events to the relevant Salesforce records. In such cases, if a very old customer replies to an old case email, – enquiring about product availability, Salesforce by default may end up re-opening the cases where the service agent has nothing to resolve.

The best way to avoid such scenarios is to assess and tier the data based on importance get it archived and isolate the data from the current production environment for better data relevance in Salesforce. For reference, you can adapt to this data tiering approach to manage the email influx in Salesforce

Do Not Leave Out on the Email Attachments!

Based on the London Word Tour highlights, on the 6th of June 2024, Salesforce introduced the Data Cloud Vector Database to help businesses unlock the potential of unstructured data. This has sought to unify, the unstructured data resembles anything stored across Salesforce and is less accessible to analyze like documents, knowledge repositories, transcripts, PDFs or email attachments, weighing down your platform file storage yet never being used. The vector database enablement by Salesforce will help businesses read the documents without having to read them! 

Don’t leave out the email attachments from this time! This can have a great potential to retrace the customer journey in Salesforce, instead of removing it from your Salesforce resort to file archiving and get it a safe save. Archiving email attachments with Salesforce Email object data has become a common practice today. Check out this use case to learn how you can archive emails with attachments in Salesforce. 

DataArchiva: Your Optimal Solution for Salesforce Email Data Archiving & Storage Efficiency

DataArchiva had been a default choice for many regulated companies like healthcare, manufacturing, public service firms, finance institutions, and e-commerce aggregators for long-term data retention. As most of their email conversations capture sensitive information, even if the Salesforce data is over 5 years old, regulations like HIPAA, FINRA, etc. don’t allow data deletion till a certain period.

DataArchiva allows you to schedule an auto-archive of your email message data from Salesforce, but it also comes with top-notch compliance and security features like policy-based archiving and provides advanced encryption AES 256 to protect the data-at-rest. It provides two archiving solutions, one is a 100% native application to archive data in Big Objects and an external archiving application to leverage your AWS, Azure, Heroku, or On-prem Systems to archive Salesforce data with 100% ownership & control.

As immediate benefits of archiving Salesforce email data with DataArchiva:

• Maximize your cost advantage and optimize Salesforce data storage expenses by implementing DataArchiva to manage your email archiving jobs. 
• Bulk archiving of email data from Salesforce with DataArchiva External Archive for immediate system performance boost
• A scheduler to automate the archiving job even if Salesforce generates gigabytes of email data per month it runs scheduled archival seamlessly without disturbing the production processes
• Keeps Salesforce data compliance-ready with its Intelligence to maintain hierarchies and complex object relationships when set up for archival jobs
• Allows retaining old email data into cost-effective storage without compromising Security
• Keeps Salesforce data storage akin, so that Salesforce performance is in ship shape during the next hype cycles
• Powerful archiving tool with restoration promise ensuring 100% accessibility of data archived from Salesforce.

For some deeper insight into DataArchiva’s purpose-built features on email archiving, get your hands on this free datasheet today!

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