Email Reply Tracking

[acaringi]

It would be great if Hubspot had the ability to track how many replies I got to my marketing newsletters. A lot of our newsletters are designed to get people to reply to them instead of having them click on something, so really the reply rate is what we want to measure over CTR.

Each newsletter is sent from a dynamically populated email address (based on the sales rep who is working with the lead), so it's pretty impossible to track this by just monitoring an inbox. 

[acaringi]

@BB1 yup totally correct there. This would be that order of operation:

1) Marketing email sent to contact

2) Contact replies to a connected inbox which was the "reply-to" address of email

3) Someone at the company (marketers, account rep, etc.) replies and logs the email. Then the text of the contacts reply will show up in the CRM 

If you are using just a connected inbox and not a team inbox, then the text of the replies are not automatically logged in step 2 above, and you need step 3. 

And to further clarify, in either case, the data point will be created which is what shows up in the reporting pages, lists, workflows, and on the timeline (X contact, replied to Y email). 

Hope that is all clear now @elise1 & @BB1 

[acaringi]

@elise1 - If all the contact owners already have their inboxes connected to HubSpot then the data (x contact replied to y email) should populate on the email reporting pages showing reply rates & which contacts replied to what email.  Additionally, the data will show up in workflows & lists to build with. 

What will not show up with your current configurations is the actual content of the reply that lands in the contact owner's inbox. Aka logging the email in the CRM. To get that functionality the inbox needs to be setup as a team inbox. 

[acaringi]

@elise1 yep that should work just fine. We have a number of customers who are doing something similar. As long as those contact owners have their inboxes connected to HubSpot (personal or otherwise) we should be able to generate the data that shows up in the email reports. 

If you want the email to be logged to the contact timeline though, then you will need your reps to have their inboxes set up as team inboxes. Instructions here for that.

Hope that helps. 

[acaringi]

Hi folks- this is now live to all customers, with documentation here on how it works, and how to set it up. Feel free to continue to leave feedback here on how it works, and if you run into any issues please reach out through the normal HubSpot support channels.  

[acaringi]

Hi folks - This is now in a Beta. We have been running an Alpha for some time now, and we are moving ahead in opening this up to a wider audience. All the folks who originally signed up via the google form I posted in this community thread have now been granted access. 

If you missed that google signup form please send me a direct message with your HubSpot Account ID + an email address and I will send over instructions and get you added to the Beta.

[acaringi]

Hi folks- We are ~3-4 weeks away from kicking off the Alpha for this project. We had a lot of people sign-up, so we had to do 2 things: 

1. The Alpha signup form is now closed. As soon as we are comfortable with the stability of the solution, we will open this back up & make it generally available. 
2. We were only able to select a portion of those who signed up to participate in the Alpha. For those folks who were selected, I’ll be sending instructions on how to get access to the alpha and more information on how it will work.
3. For those folks who weren’t selected, I’ll be reaching out to let you know. You will also be the first to get access as soon as we progress to the next stage.

Thank you for all your patience, and I am looking to finally getting this one resolved for you all!

[acaringi]

@Levi hey yea - So right now our goal is to get to an Alpha by the end of September. This is a goal we are setting, but it is subject to change.  In a comment above I posted a form here. Make sure you fill this out if you are interested in being included in this Alpha. We will select a handful from that list to get early access and to give us early feedback.

You will need to have your `reply-to` address be a connected inbox  or a HubSpot hosted/ fall back inbox. For connected inboxes we will only support Gmail or Outlook inboxes. The first step in this project will be surfacing data in HubSpot on which contacts are replying to which emails. ex/

This data will show up on individual email reporting pages, as well as the global level across email campaigns in the email analyze reporting pages. We will also enable this data to be used in the lists and workflows tool. ex/

Let me know if there are any other questions! Excited to get this one solved for you all 😀

[acaringi]

Hi folks -

Thank you for the comments, feedback, and honesty. I understand the frustration that the lack of functionality, and stagnation over the last 3 years is causing. Recognizing the repetitiveness of this comment, I will say we are actively moving towards bringing a solution for this into HubSpot.

What I am looking for now is to start pulling apart this problem with all of you individually. We are looking to understand all of your use cases in greater detail, and needs from a reply tracking solution. This will also be the pipeline we use for getting customers into an Alpha/ Beta once we have reached that point. If you are interested in providing feedback as we build out a reply tracking solution in HubSpot, and participating in an Alphas/Beta, then please fill out this form.

I hope everyone here is doing well during these stressful times.

[acaringi]

Hi Everyone - 

Taking this thread over from @Shay  Yes, this work item is in-planning right now. We haven't yet started development on it. We know roughly the work needed to get there and it should be prioritized in the near future. I will update this thread with more details once that timeline becomes clearer.

As we get closer  hopefully I can gather a few folks from here to get some early feedback. Looking forward to getting this one solved for you all! 

Cheers,

Jake

[acaringi]

Hi all, wanted to share an update here. First off, we have definitely been paying attention here, and have been following along closely with all your feedback. Apologies for the radio silence, we didn't have anything super meaniful to share at the time. I have some good news, we totally agree that this is a very impactful feature for the HubSpot product and are doing a lot of research right now to identify how and when we can make this possible. We want this to reach it's full potential, including offering capabilites to enroll/unenroll from a workflow, log replies on contact timelines, offer list segmentation, rich email reporting, the whole kitchen sink. 

We'll be deep in planning and research for a little while on this so we may not have a beta soon, but I wanted to let you all know that there is light at the end of this tunnel and that your feedback was not falling on deaf ears. Bear with us on this, there's a lot to this feature but we think you're going to get a lot from it. 

[acaringi]

For some of our email marketing campaigns, our goal is to encourage a response/dialogue with their sales rep who is sending the email. It would be very helpful if one of the email marketing analytics we could track were replies sent to the "From Email Address". Ideally, "Out of Office Replies" would not be counted in this analytic.

[Thefunnelmaster]

I 100% support and agree with @NickRise. It would be great to also be able to suppress people from workflows based on if they reply to an email.

[abrengues]

Hubspot, here's my message :

[andrew_gust]

Chiming in with an additional voice saying that this feature would be absolutely crucial to some campaigns for us as well.

[Travis_Johnson]

I agree! would love to see this feature. Not ALL CTA's are click-through based interactions. I do not necessarily liksendingng them to a form response page either. i just want to make it easy for them to reply, gather the data,and have this reply % information on my campaign results. 

[alaffin]

This would be a huge help for us!  Would love to see the feature added.

[1854208]

1) It's not only crucial in building workflows for marketing but for the sales team to have a better understanding of how email are performing. Click and opens are great but responses from a CTA in an email like setting up a meeting would be invaluable. 

2) We run our own A/B tests on our outbound sequences and we'd love to include replies to emails as a stat of how they perform. 

3) It seems that this is already being tracked on some level withing sequences becuase anytime someone replies to an email they are removed from the sequnce. 

Than you,

Kristin 

[lknight2591]

If replies aren't being tracked - why does the feature exist to build workflows off them? 

[Manu]

Same; responses are already tracked on the Hubspot sales side and all it requires is the Connected Inbox feature to be used. This shouldn't be hard to do...

[Manu]

Yep, please do this! Also requested at least here:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Tracking-Marketing-Email-Responses/idc-p/173716#M1312...

and here:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Track-Email-Responses-in-Marketing-Workflows/idi-p/30...

[Kreddy]

It would be extremely valuable to be able to view all the contacts that replied to a marketing email. Replying to a marketing email can imply a high level of interest in your company. 
Being able to easily track this as metric is very important in demonstrating the value of marketing and the value HubSpot provides. It would also help to ensure all leads are followed up on and opportunities are not missed out on.

*I see that when you go to an email's performance page, click on Recipients, then view each individual's click activity, if they Replied it shows up as an action. (AS DEPICTED BELOW). Being able to create a list of all the contacts that replied to a marketing email would be EXTREMELY BENEFICIAL.

[Nolte]

This is a very basic need.

Everything is in place withing the email integration to track so why the option isn't there for us to enable is a big questionmark.

[Nolte]

At least an indicator that someone replied to our marketing emails would be a help.

Right now there is no way to track replies in a scalable way.

Getting replies without a good overview is just bad practice.

[Nolte]

If you can't track replies properly, sending out email is nothing different than handing out physical, paper flyers in the streets.

Good luck with tracking anything from that. 

This best practice 101 (trackability) is just as important as deliverability.

That it isn't there still, is crazy.

[trudy]

 Its been a year since this idea was posted... How does a marketing and sales software not track this super basic metric???

[Willsweet]

It's very frustrating that this isn't possible. We've run multiple campaigns where the primary CTA is just to respond with a good time for a call. The response rates have been great - as a CTA format it's more effective than a landing page at generating the same thing - but measuring this kind of campaign is a nightmare because we have to manually count the emails in a busy sales inbox.

It's possible to do this with emails tracked from sidekick, so why can't I do it with HubSpot email campaigns? Sidekick isn't funtional enough to replace an email campaign; but email campaigns don't track as well as sidekick.

[oofournier]

@jmiller2 Here is another thread requesting this! Can you upvote? 

[Anu]

We desperately need this feature !!! 

[willykay]

Very surprising that this still hasn't been done!

We use Workflows, and when we receive replies, they need to appear in the contacts feed so we can then reply via HubSpot...they also need to be tracked, so as mentioned we can use if/then branches for these instances

I feel like hubspot have done a lot of things really well - but email integration and functionality seems to be lacking!

[mattgeller]

We could REALLY use this!

[MorganneH]

Yes, please!!! I second this 🙌

Is this feature in the works, HubSpot?