In the Reply Management module, you can define how your system will organize and react to reply mails from your recipients. All incoming reply mails are categorized and processed and forwarded as defined by you. Reply Management is able to categorize email replies in multiple languages.
This way, important reply mails will not get lost among the bulk of out of office emails.
Notes:
- To open the Reply Management page, go to Contacts > Reply Management.
- If you would like to reply to your contacts' emails by sending automatic replies, see Channel Engagement - Sending auto-replies.
As a quick reminder, here is the onboarding video about Reply management:
Before you start: Reply mails and data protection (GDPR)
Reply mails from your customers contain personal data and therefore fall under data protection legislation such as GDPR. This is how reply mails are handled in this regard:
-
Retrieval - The only way to retrieve all reply mails from a particular contact is via an Emarsys Support request. (Support ticket creation).
You can open and manually copy the contents of an individual mail, but unless you know the email campaign that triggered the reply, or the date, finding it can be difficult. - Deletion - Deleting a reply mail from the inbox is not possible in the Platform interface. The only way to do this is via an Emarsys Support request.
Automated deletion after 30 days
You can ask Emarsys Support to activate our purge feature which will immediately delete all reply emails in the inbox older than 30 days, and automatically delete them after this time period in the future. The situation will therefore be as follows:
- Retrieval - Reply mails are automatically purged after 30 days, so locating and copying individual reply mails from a contact should not be too hard. However, if your volume is high enough that you are afraid of missing something, you can submit an Emarsys Support request for an export of all mails from a particular contact.
- Deletion - Since no reply mails are stored for longer than 30 days, and GDPR allows a 30-day window for deletion, all such requests are self-fulfilling and you need take no action.
If you require a full export of all your existing reply mails before they are purged, please contact Emarsys Support.
If you want to store reply mails for a longer period, you must use the Forward with action buttons feature to direct all relevant reply mails to your own designated email account.
Setting up a reply domain
To set up a dedicated domain for reply management, you have to register a domain or create a subdomain.
- Have your provider or network administrator show you the MX record of the domain or subdomain for Emarsys. The name server entry for the MX record must be changed.
- If you make the entry in an administration menu interface, enter
mx.eemms.net. as a target in the MX entry of the favored domain or subdomain. All other settings can remain unchanged. - If you make the entry via an admin console, enter the following in the zonefile of the domain/subdomain:
IN MX 10 mx.eemms.net
- If you make the entry in an administration menu interface, enter
- Please provide Emarsys Support with the domain/subdomain name used, so that we can activate the domain/subdomain for your account.
Domains/subdomains which were already set up for the display of trackable links in the Emarsys application and changed to Emarsys per C-Name entry, cannot be used.
Reply email categories
You can respond to your contacts' emails by sending automatic replies. For more information, see Channel Engagement - Sending auto-replies.
For each reply email address, all emails are subdivided into the following six categories based on keywords identified in the reply emails themselves:
- Unsubscribe – These reply emails were sent by contacts as a means to unsubscribe (instead of clicking the unsubscribe button). They need to be acted upon, since any further emails from your side might be reported as spam.
Emails containing only the word "unsubscribe" will not be automatically categorized into this group, as all our email campaigns must contain an unsubscribe link with the same text.
- Change-profile – These are automated or manual reply emails that indicate that the contact has changed jobs or the company domain has changed. They are crucial for updating contact data and keeping email addresses valid.
- Challenge Response – These reply emails constitute an anti-spam technique (US only) which sends emails only after senders have authenticated (by clicking a link or sending an email with content that cannot be generated automatically). This way some companies/providers try to avoid (automatically generated) emails from mass email senders. If an email inbox server was configured for challenge response, it sends an email to the reply email address of your email; the potential recipient, who wants to receive your emails, does not receive any.
- Contact us – These reply emails indicate that a recipient wants to get in touch with you. They are triggered by clicking the Reply button in the email.
- Out of Office – These are out-of-office reply emails.
- Unknown – These reply emails could not be categorized. Emarsys improves the categorization rules on a constant basis, so that there will be fewer and fewer reply mails assigned to this category. If you would like to update the reply email category keywords, please contact Emarsys Support.
The Reply Management page - Inbox
The Inbox tab displays a list of reply emails which were sent to Emarsys.
The Reply Management Inbox is only able to display messages below 10MB.
The list can be filtered using the following criteria:
- Go to Email and select a specific email to view the corresponding reply emails.
- Go to Category and select a reply email category.
- Go to Mailboxes and specify a mailbox.
- Go to Time range and select a start and end date; the list displays only reply emails which were received within this period.
The Email recipient column of the list contains the email addresses of your recipients; as a rule, the From column displays the same email address. If these email addresses are not identical, the sender of the reply mail has used a different email account (a different email address, an alias) for his/her message. In addition, the list has columns for the subject line of your email, the reply email category and the date when the reply email was sent.
Filtering the reply emails
The header section of the email contains information about campaign the reply email was sent to. To identify the original campaign and see the emails, filter for the reply mailbox addresses. Click on Show filters to access them.
There is no reset function for the filter settings and you cannot disable it. Just navigate away from the page - by going to the action tab and get back, for example. This clears your previously selected filter values.
Most servers remove information of the original campaign from the mail header when replying to, or forwarding a particular email. If the header is missing, the Reply Management is not able to identify the original campaign that the reply was sent to.
Show message
To view detailed information on a specific reply email, click Show Message.
Edit contact profile
To access the contact profile associated with an email address in the list, tick the corresponding check box and click Edit Contact Profile.
The Reply Management page - Actions
On the Actions tab, you can decide how reply mails are to be handled.
Create new reply mailbox
You can create new reply mailboxes as follows:
- Click Create New to open the corresponding dialog box.
- Replace the undefined string with a string of your choice. This constitutes the address component prefixing the @ sign; for the domain name suffixing the @ sign you can use either eemms.net (the Emarsys email domain) or an existing customized domain/subdomain.
The domain/subdomain you specify is reserved for Emarsys emails. You cannot use email domains for which you have already set up inboxes with other mail servers.
Create new address
Click Create Address to add the address to the list.
Delete address
To remove an address, tick the corresponding check box and click Delete Address.
You can only delete the addresses which were created by your user.
Edit a reply mailbox
Define how to handle reply mails:
- Click Edit.
- For each category you can select one of the following actions:
- Forward with action buttons – Reply emails with this category assigned are forwarded to the email addresses which you enter on the right. You can use these reply addresses as a from email when creating a campaign. See Forward with action buttons.
-
Forward – Reply emails with this category assigned are forwarded to one or several email addresses, which you can enter in the Forward to column. When you forward reply mails to multiple email addresses, separate them with the semicolon '
;' character. For example:example1@yourdomain.com;example2@yourdomain.com;example3@yourdomain.com - Ignore – Reply emails with this category assigned can be ignored; e.g. Out-of-Office emails.
Delete the reply mail
If you want the system to automatically delete the reply mails after the defined action has been performed, activate the Delete option.
Forward with action buttons
The purpose of this feature is to make it easier for you to act when a contact sends a reply mail, by providing a number of predefined actions. If you set this option for a particular category, those reply mails are forwarded to the email address(es) entered and a button is added to execute the appropriate action. Also, you can use these reply addresses as a from email when creating a campaign.
For example, if you enable this for unsubscribes, a button will be provided for you to unsubscribe the contact immediately.