The Reply Inbox for Campaign Responses

Updated September 29, 2026·Following Up·Share on X

When a lead replies to your follow-up, you want to know right away and act on it. The reply inbox collects responses to your campaign and email sends so they do not get buried in your regular mailbox, and links each one back to the lead who sent it.

The reply inbox is coming soon. Reading replies needs read access to your mailbox, and every Gmail and Outlook inbox connects in Basic (send only) for now. Until reply tracking is available, the reply inbox is hidden from the sidebar, campaign pages and reports don't show reply numbers, and replies land only in your own mailbox. Answer them there, and stop the lead's sequence from the campaign page when they reply so they don't get the next step. LinkedIn replies still pause a lead's sequence on their own; read and answer those on LinkedIn. The rest of this article describes how the inbox works once it's available.

Once it's available, open Reply inbox from the sidebar.

What lands in the inbox

Replies from leads to the emails you sent through Conference Hero show up here. Each reply captures the sender's name and email, the subject, a preview snippet, and, depending on your mailbox access level, the full message body, along with when it arrived. Because follow-ups send from your own connected mailbox, the inbox reflects responses to the messages you actually sent as yourself.

Whether the whole reply shows in-app depends on how you connected. Gmail on the Advanced level reads headers only, so the inbox shows the preview snippet and you open the message in Gmail for the rest. Connect Gmail with Full reply reading (or Outlook on Advanced) to read the complete reply text here.

Read and unread

Replies are marked unread until you open them, so the inbox doubles as a to-do list of conversations waiting on you. Open a reply to read the full message and mark it read. This keeps the focus on responses you have not handled yet.

Linking back to the lead

Every reply is tied to the lead it came from, and to the specific campaign send or draft that prompted it. From a reply you can jump to the lead's drawer to see their full history: notes, activity, past emails, and any meetings. That context means you can answer with the whole relationship in view, not just the last message.

The reply is also attributed to the mailbox that received it, so on a team, each person sees the responses to their own outreach.

Triage and suggested next actions

Each reply is tagged with a category, either auto-labeled by AI or set by you: Interested, Not now, Out of office, Referral, Unsubscribe request, or Other. Click any tag to override it. The category drives a one-click next action on the reply:

Interested - Schedule a meeting. Opens the lead with the Meetings tab ready.
Not now - Add a follow-up task, so the lead comes back around when the timing is better.
Referral - Add the referred person as a new lead.

The buttons just take you to the right place with the context loaded; nothing happens to the lead until you act.

Keeping the conversation going

A reply is the signal to move fast. From the lead you can:

Reply directly and keep the thread going from your own inbox.
Schedule or log a meeting if they are ready to talk.
Update the lead's temperature or notes so the rest of the team has current context.

Because follow-ups send from your own mailbox, you can also just answer the reply straight from Gmail or Outlook. The inbox is there so nothing slips through when you are moving between the booth, the hotel, and the airport. Check it once in the morning and once at night during a busy event, clear the unread items, and every warm lead gets a same-day answer.

Bounced emails

Not every message reaches an inbox. When an address is dead, the mail server sends back a delivery-failure notice (a bounce) from a sender like "Mail Delivery Subsystem". Conference Hero reads those notices in your connected mailbox, matches the failed address back to the lead, and does two things automatically:

Marks that send as bounced so your campaign stats stay accurate.
Unsubscribes the lead with the reason "Bounce" and cancels any remaining steps in their sequence, so you never keep emailing an address that does not exist.

This runs in the background for every mailbox connected with reply tracking (Advanced, coming soon for new connections), so a bad address is suppressed once instead of bouncing again on the next step. You do not need to do anything. A lead suppressed this way shows an unsubscribe reason of "Bounce" on their record.

Why replies matter for scoring

A reply is one of the strongest signals a lead can send. When someone writes back, treat it as a reason to raise their temperature and prioritize them ahead of leads who have gone quiet. Keeping the lead's notes and temperature current means your next campaign targets the people actually leaning in.