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.

[matteocloudnova]

We need this!

[jennrogers]

Come on, this seems such a logical idea

[RafiPN]

Yes! Yes! A Thousand times yes!

[CoderList]

... how can we be nearly two years on from this idea being posted and it's still not here?!

Have only recently signed up for Hubspot, and this could actually be grounds for me leaving. 

[CH4]

+1 on this

[salman]

Absolutely agree! This is an ongoing requirment for us, whereby we want to branch out the workflows based on replies to the marketing email.

[yasemindp]

+1 to this 

[ldudley]

I would like a way to view/show email responses in a contact record in reverse chronological order.

[mmaheshwari]

 Intercom has been doing this for years. It's completely crazy that this feature should not be available in HubSpot.

[melissaschmidt]

We have had quite a few angry contacts who have responded to multiple emails in the workflow but continued to receive follow up emails from the workflow. I was able to find a workaround by connecting the inbox of the email address that these people are coming from, but we have definitely lost customers because this option does not exist.

[DrAS]

Is anyone from Hubspot listening?

[MarketingMax]

We really need this feature. Good marketing emails are meant to elicit responses, so why wouldn't this would be an integral feature.

[jmiro1]

Also really need this - pretty baffled everything else is trackable but not this... any b2b business would require this in their automated email funnels

[jonny_day]

I completely with agree with a huge number of the statements in this thread. 

Hubspot sort this out... 2 years waiting now! 

Hubspot enable you to send mass emails via workflows, but the recommendations from support at use a CTA button to a form that creates a custom property which is then able to be referenced to pull a user from a workflow. Or Use a sequence, but that does not help when working on outbound lists. Fine you want to drive inbound logic, but even with a flywheel approach you still need inbound and outbound approaches to build the flywheel.

Sequences are perfect for 1-2-1 but when you want to do true 1-2-many you need the ability to unenroll based on user replies. 

What's strange is via the Gmail integration Hubspot is able to thread a message in inbox against a contact record, which suggests they can connect. Email > Contact. Workflow > Contact. But not to enable you to unenroll users when Email is Sent and an action is taken. Please fix.

[thisisdatis]

Agreed - what's the status of this?

[Shay]

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. 

[RM-HS]

+1 also need this for workflow triggers

[andreff]

+1

[Sara21]

Hola, 

Mis clientes tienen la costumbre de responder los mails. Da igual que sean de marketing o qué. Actualmente no tenemos esta opción y la veo necesaria!!!!

[BB1]

Hola @Sara21 

¡Este es definitivamente un componente crítico para muchas empresas y usuarios!

¡Que tengas un gran día!