The main goal of a good email campaign is to have your prospects complete the CTA (call-to-action)… take the trial, signup for the newsletter, visit your landing page. However, sometimes those prospects do the unexpected and reply to your campaign email with a question or looking to be contacted directly. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to use a CTA other than having the prospect reply to your email. What’s worse, even with a very targeted and vetted list, these valid leads often get lost in the inevitable flood of out-of-office replies, spam catcher/challenge replies or no-longer-works-here bounces.
What’s a marketer or salesperson to do? Use “Reply Tracking” to:
- Trigger new actions based on replies to an email
- Pull people who replied out of the list (no need to follow up and ask them to that event again if they already replied!)
- Keep using your noreply@ email address or name your virtual salesperson so people feel comfortable replying to their emails.
Don’t worry, we’ll help ignore spam, automatic out of office emails, and maternity leave messages.
Reply tracking isn’t just for marketing, it is also a powerful tool for the sales team. Sales is a contact sport, so it is important that all engagement with a prospect is tracked in the sales CRM, which of course should be synced with the marketing automation system. This is easy to do if the sales team is initiating contact via the CRM platform or MAP system, but all too often they are communicating to prospects with their Gmail, Office 365, or other email client app. While it is possible to capture outbound traffic the really important information is in the harder to capture inbound replies. Again ActiveDEMAND reply tracking has you covered.
Real marketing automation and sales-enablement platforms cover all the communication channels – email, phones, SMS, etc, and not only outbound but the more importantly inbound traffic as well. If you’re looking to track incoming email replies, phone calls, form fills, text messages and more, start your trial with ActiveDEMAND.
When sending marketing emails, often prospects reply to an email. These replies are a great signal that indicates whether the prospect is interested in learning more about your product or service. ActiveDEMAND does have reply tracking capabilities.
Reply Tracking with Gmail or Google Workspace (GSuite) Email accounts
1. Navigate to your "Profile Settings" at the top right corner of ActiveDEMAND.
2. Select the "Preferences" Tab and scroll down to "Third Party Applications".
3. Select "Add Application".
4. Select "Email Server" as the Application Type and "Gmail".
5. Enter your Google Email Address and select "Sign in with Google."
6. You will be redirected to Google. Select the Google Email Address that you want to integrate with ActiveDEMAND and sign in.
7. Select "Allow".
8. Once the authentication is complete, you will be redirected to ActiveDEMAND. A test email will be sent to confirm successful authentication. When this is complete, select "Save".
9. You have successfully authenticated your Google Email Address with ActiveDEMAND! A check mark will appear beside your email address.
- Only log marketing email replies: If this is checked, any incoming emails will be logged from the connected account if ActiveDEMAND can detect evidence of the email being sent from ActiveDEMAND. The parser looks for tracking tokens etc in the incoming email and logs this as an email reply history item.
- Create Contacts on Polled: This will create contacts: This will log incoming email from any source and create contacts if the contact does not already exist.
Warning
Do not check option 2 unless you want all incoming email to be logged in your ActiveDEMAND account.
Reply Tracking using IMAP
You can have ActiveDEMAND automatically check your inbox to see if any emails you received are in response to a sent tracked email from ActiveDEMAND.
Step 1: Add Employee to ActiveDEMAND
All email tracking using this method requires an Employee contact to exist in ActiveDEMAND. The employee does not need to have a login account, but the configuration for polling the IMAP server is done on the employee contact edit screen.
Step 2: Browse to the Employee's contact screen
Step 3:
On the contact edit screen, Add third party application: EmailServer
ActiveDEMAND will poll this email account's inbox looking for replies to marketing emails sent from ActiveDEMAND. If a reply has been detected, ActiveDEMAND will log a EmailReply contact history item on the contact in ActiveDEMAND that replied to the marketing email. ActiveDEMAND will attempt to filter out any 'garbage' replies like out of office, no longer works here, etc.
Detecting Replies
Every valid reply (ActiveDEMAND suppresses out of office replies) will be logged as a EmailReply contact history item on the contact that replied. Thus you can set goals based on Contact History type = EmailReply. As well you can filter your contact database using the same query and/or set up special workflows to forward the reply to specific recipients.
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