K
Keith Besherse
Reading and responding to email is a time consuming and necessary part of everyone's day.
Working through your inbox in chronological order is not necessarily the most effective use of your time and energy.
If you could segment the inbound messages your business receives and triage them based on which ones require the most attention from your limited capacity, would that be helpful?
The goal is to handle inquiries for different purposes differently.
The public email address might be info@a.agencyname. The workflow would be a general inquiries (FAQ) response.
The book appointments email would be appointments@a.agencyname. The workflow would be calendar booking focused.
Different product emails would trigger different workflows: product1@a.agencyname would get a different reply than product2@a.agencyname.
The email address on the business card would trigger a different response than the info@a.agencyname. (These are people the agency owner has met at least once.)
Clients would be given help@a.agencyname for technical issues and support@a.agencyname for marketing advice. The help workflow initiates a trouble ticket. The support workflow initiates a marketing campaign perspective response.
In the dental clinic space it might be:
info@a.clinicname for general inquiries (FAQ).
appointments@a.clinicname for, well, appointments!
implants@a.clinicname
dentures@a.clinicname
emergency@a.clinicname would trigger an immediate notification sequence.
When I first had this idea I was thinking in terms of the difference between leads (cold), networking contacts (warm), and current customers.
I don't want all three audiences sending emails to me by name. I want to segment the audience. If the public has sales@...marketing.com I could have a spam filter, lead qualification, then appointment booking workflow. I would use keith@...marketing.com on my business card knowing that anyone sending an email there is a networking contact but not necessarily a prospect. Current customers would get the "secret handshake" email address, keb@...marketing.com, for priority handling.
K
Keith Besherse
But...
This is even more critical with the proliferation of AI.
We can prompt the bot based on which address the email was sent to!
The point is, we are doing marketing with the goal of getting people to contact our client. To make our client's life as simple as possible we want to automate responses when possible. We can already do that with inbound SMS. Using Voice AI we can now do it with inbound calls. It seems to me that replying to email shouldn't be as difficult as it is.
Here is what I am thinking:
Inbound requests from your current customers shouldn't wait until after you have responded to solicitations from potential vendors.
Vendor reports of supply chain disruptions should have higher priority than routine reports from your HR department.
And potential sales opportunities which are the lifeblood of your business should get your utmost attention.
Therefore, what if you could give different email addresses to different categories of outside entities?
AND
What if you had a way to automatically respond to those which don't require your immediate attention (or the ones which require an immediate response but the response tends to be standardized/templated?
Help@ your company - automatically create a trouble ticket.
Client1@ your company - respond with a message customized to the services you provide to that customer.
Client2@ your company - respond with a message customized to the services you provide to that customer.
Clientn@ your company - respond with a message customized to the services you provide to that customer.
Ventor1@ your company - respond with a message customized to the services that vendor provides.
Ventor2@ your company - respond with a message customized to the services that vendor provides.
Ventorn@ your company - respond with a message customized to the services that vendor provides.
Sales@ or Hello@ or Info@ your company - respond with a generic message about your company (but only after filtering for potential spam indicators).
Product1@ your company - respond with a message customized to the question about that product.
Product2@ your company - respond with a message customized to the question about that product.
Productn@ your company - respond with a message customized to the question about that product.
In each case, prioritize the notification & task to yourself so you personally review the most critical messages first!
A
Alex Poe
This would be great.
S
Steven Haye
This would be so awesome! It could work in a similar way to how slack allows you to send emails to a channel. I could see using a trigger like this in combination with the custom code action unlocking a lot of integration potential with GHL.
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Ethan McClean
This would add so much functionality, along with being able to filter and trigger actions from the incoming 'to' email address. One issue which is really limiting my company fully embracing HL
A
Adrian King
Yes please.
This would be particularly useful if, like the trigger "Customer Replied" it can be set to only trigger if the email has a particular phrase or content.
We could use this in conjunction with a condition to then check what else they have written in the email to create useful automations that save us a lot of time.
Very basic example for illustrative purposes attached... Replace 'Buy Fruit', 'Lemons' and 'Apples' with whatever useful automation function you can imagine for a business.
I can see lots of uses for this to reduce repetitive customer service tasks, and also for integration with third party systems that don't have webhook capabilities by having them send email notifications in, which in turn trigger an automation based on the content of the notification.
(In this image I am using the 'Customer Replied' trigger which does not work for new inbound emails, but the visual should help to illustrate the concept that would work with an 'Email Received' trigger.
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Keith Besherse
Adrian King, Yes. Filters! Please also see the related ideas I also linked. Some of them are the same or a similar suggestion. Others are supporting ideas.
J
Jordan Wheeler
This would also be a partial solution to battling inbound spam.
Essential!
M
Marcel Lee
Triggering workflows off of incoming emails is vital for improving efficiency and ensuring timely actions. Whether based on the recipient or sender's email, this capability is definitely needed.
K
Keith Besherse
Marcel Lee, thank you. I have no idea why this idea still has less than 100 votes. (Actually, I do. Most of the people with high volume traffic needing automated sorting are using an integration/synchronization with a real ESP, email service provider. They aren’t sorting manually in the Conversations tab.)
H
Hans Thisen
Would be a great addition. Would also enable full support ticket systems via email to support@xyz.com
Right now the support ticket system only works with forms as the trigger.
K
Keith Besherse
K
Keith Besherse
K
Keith Besherse
With a filter to identify whether it is an existing or new client and which email address it was sent to:
sales@...
support@...
spam@...
salami@...
sardines@...
salad@...
You get the idea!
Not an actual SMTP email address with IMAP/POP servers.
Simply a Workflow trigger so I send the salami nurturing sequence to people who want salami and sardines nurturing sequence to people who want sardines!
In my case I would make the addressee be the networking group where I met the person:
bni@ my agency domain
chamber@ my agency domain
rotary@ my agency domain
americanlegion@ my agency domain
levelup@ my agency domain
K
Keith Besherse
OH! Another use case: When we are setting up accounts with vendors we can use purchases@ my agency domain, vendor1@ my agency domain, vendor2@ my agency domain, etc to separate incoming invoices and receipts from client related messages.
Thanks Kerry Taft
K
Keith Besherse
This has been a known issue for quite a long time.
S
Srikanth Chellaboina
Merged in a post:
Workflow Trigger - Email Received
C
Christopher Cool
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