HubSpot Ideas

acaringi

Email Reply Tracking

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. 

HubSpot Updates
April 04, 2021 09:11 AM

@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 

March 29, 2021 12:01 PM

@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. 

 

 

March 29, 2021 08:00 AM

@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. 

Delivered
March 29, 2021 07:12 AM

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.  

In Beta
November 30, 2020 04:04 PM

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.

In Planning
September 11, 2020 07:06 AM

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!

August 24, 2020 10:27 AM

@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/

Screen Shot 2020-08-24 at 1.21.23 PM.png

 

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/

Screen Shot 2020-08-24 at 1.25.00 PM.png

 

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

April 20, 2020 02:22 PM

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.

February 26, 2020 09:31 AM

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

In Planning
February 15, 2019 05:49 AM

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. Smiley Happy

April 03, 2017 01:54 PM

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.

178 Replies
rwolupo
Top Contributor

would love that feature

Marie-Michelle
Participant

Just want to add a strong vote to this idea.  We need it!

Khircia
Member

This is a must-have for our team, too. With the emerging trend of conversation-oriented marketing, such a metric would be gold!!! I understand that this is not easy to implement and has huge potential but there are two things I'd love to see here:

 

1. A statistic that would enable measuring response rate of marketing email in the "Performance" tab of an email.

2. A condition for a workflow: If a user replied to the email then...

 

The first one is a must-have, second is more like nice-to-have.

 

Could we get any status update? The last reply from the product team is from almost a year ago...

 

PavedToPines
Member

Bumping this idea once again!

 

Shouldn't be too hard to do this, most, if not all, email marketing services have this as an option

ChloeP
Member

+1 to this request as well! This is essential to ABM initiatives. 

 

Use Cases:

1) We want to be able the track # of replies by ABM campaign.Within each ABM campaign, we also want to know which email had the highest reply rate. 

2) Triggger workflow based on a reply 

 

We are currently manually tracking replies in a google sheet and alerting reps. 

ianpetzer
Participant

Was so dissapointed to find out after we had moved our whole company to Hubspot about this abyssmal lack of functionality. Would've been a dealbreaker  but now its so hard to move away from Hubspot after moving all our of data into the CRM.

 

The only thing worse is the poorly labelled logic in the workflow designer which allows you to think you are creating workflows that take customer replies to your marketing emails into consideration in the workflow logic but in fact are only looking at replies to "sales" emails.

 

Took us months to figure out that engaged customers that were talking to a sales consultant were also being sent automated marketing emails.

 

 

 

ebarrett
Member

It's been almost a full year since HubSpot replied to this convo with the answer that this was In Planning...UPDATE, please!

pmurphy
Member

I also share the frustrations of many others in the thread. We also just moved everything over from Salesforce/Pardot and really thought this functionality was included. This is a completely essential functionality for us. I see that the last update from Hubspot was nearly a year ago. 

AminAkhtar
Member

This is such an essential feature for marketing. 

There are so many cases of marketing/sales cannibalism that can be easily avoided by knowing when a prospect has replied to an email.

fujisun
Participant | Diamond Partner

I'd also like the property that records that the contact replied to the marketing email, for example, ' Recent sales email replied date ' for marketing emails. I was looking to create a workflow where there is if/then branch and whoever hasn't replied to our marketing emails would go to NO and will be sent a second email.

BB1
Top Contributor

Yes @fujisun this does have a workaround;

 

Using Zapier, you can trigger a zap that any email arriving in your inbox will ping Hubspot and update a property on Hubspot (like a custom property Recent Marketing Email Reply). You can use that property to show that they contact replied and therefore take them off the workflow.

 

I hope this is clear. Otherwise, need to wait until Hubspot builds this feature.

 

(Note: you will need to use Workflows instead of Sequences because you can't remove a contact from a sequence without manual action, but anyways - you are only talking about Workflows because Sequences do stop when the contact replies.)

Nomadigo
Member

I agree that this is a very necessary feature in workflows, was extremely surprised to discover that replies to emails were not being logged under the contacts.

@Shay Is there any update as to when this may be implemented?

MarketingMax
Participant | Elite Partner

Bump. Good marketing emails should elicit a reply, so we should be able to track these and have visibility within HubSpot.

BB1
Top Contributor

Yes @MarketingMax this is basic and Hubspot is hopefully doing something about it soon.

jlahr
Member

How was this suggested 3 years ago and hasn't been built yet. 

ebarrett
Member

@BB1Time to take the rose-colored glasses off...HubSpot is wholy unresponsive to this thread for a year.  I get that it's probably a heavy lift to create, but good old fashioned periodic updates to their paying clients would be minimally appropriate.

BB1
Top Contributor

Hi - @ebarrett  - yes, maybe @Shay can break the radio silence again to light up some hope!

JDUnymira
Participant

Want to also further request this feature. Mailchimp makes it super easy, just a checkbox. Hubspot needs to as well.

jaleonard19
HubSpot Product Team

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

BB1
Top Contributor

Awesome @jaleonard19 Looking forward to seeing this resolved. Thanks Jake for speaking up.