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.

[Melly2022]

+1

[jaleonard19]

Hi, all - just following up on what Shane said. We are currently evaluating this functionality. It would be best for us to consolidate communication under this idea: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Email-Reply-Tracking/idc-p/332843/highlight/true#M551...

If folks could move over to there that would be much appreciated!

[Melly2022]

Being able to track replies would be excellent, it can also help you avoid spamming contacts that might have already communicated to you through a campaign email - "has replied to marketing email XYZ" and "has NOT replied to marketing email XYZ"

also being able to see the number of forwards, (I understand we cant see who emails were forwarded to) being able to differentiate between those that received the email initially and opened it/replied and those that received the email through a forward.

Would gladly be apart of the beta testing as I seem to get the option for a lot of other features as well! (Would be great when Beta testing if we had a section for feed back though 😉 )

[ehindery]

I read you can do this. https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Lists-Lead-Scoring-Workflows/How-to-run-automations-based-on-replie...

[ebarrett]

Thank you for trying to find a usable work-around, while HubSpot tries to build the feature. 

However, it's not a viable work-around for when our clients are replying to the multiples of contact owners we have on our outgoing email campaigns.  Their specific questions in their reply would be routed to one inbox and not get to the contact's owner.  Creating a workflow to notify the contact owner to call disregards our valued client taking the time to type a thoughtful communication in their reply.

Also, the analytics on these replies would be a separate report to run.  Not very efficient.

Keep going, HubSpot. 

[JeffBantz]

The lack of tracking something that is actually generated by HubSpot is a major miss.

The fact that the basic funcitonality requested nearly 3 years ago does not demonstrate the kind of responsiveness to customer needs one would expect from a program which is so strong in other areas.

PLEASE expedite updating this functionality.

[amiemackinnon]

Highly agree! The purpose of our marketing emails is to have someone respond and inquire for more information! We do provide other means of replying (phone number, "click to email", etc.), however, it is impossible to track who called one of our staff members because of a marketing email. "Reply to" analytics would tell me whether or not our email marketing is worth it!

[tulika]

Has there been any update on this or any workarounds? Thanks

[Levi]

Any updates on this? 🙂 

[jaleonard19]

@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 😀

[BenHP]

Is there any plan to include marketing email replies as an option in the future? It would be super helpful... for us, it prevents the issue of them receiving a follow up email encouraging them to book a meeting when they might have emailed to give a valid reason for not booking a meeting or requesting more information first. In those events we might end up frustrating prospects if we don't take them off a workflow and assigned to a rep to follow up instead.

[jaleonard19]

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!

[Melly2022]

Super fantastic news!!! Can't wait for this to be in production if not selected for Alpha 😄

[jknye07]

Didn't read through the whole feed but the functionality to knock people out of a workflow after directly replying to a worflow email would be an awesome add. Many of my workflows are set up for sales folks so being able to not over send to people that have started the dialogue with a rep would be great. 

[grafpaper]

I assumed I was using hubspot or the gmail integration wrong. Very surprised that it doesn't have this functionality out of the box.

[CoJoGo]

I'm glad to hear the Alpha for this should be launching soon. This is a critical component for our team as well, so I'd like to be considered for any other Beta or early release on this feature!

[lypratt]

This seems like a pretty basic element of 360-degree marketing: all of your contacts' information in a single place 🙂

[ClariceGr]

+1. This is essential! 

[alatswayable]

This would be a huge help. Especially since forms can only be submitted for automation via workflows, if someone responds, they should be take off the flow.

[mariejahan]

Hi there,

Any updates on the live date??