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Replying to leads

leads
Replying to leads

When an enquiry comes in, the next move is usually a reply: a price guide, a "yes, that date's free", a few questions back. 1pm lets you have that whole conversation in one place. You can answer from the Leads inbox without opening your mail client, or answer from your own email app and have it land in the same thread. Either way the lead's response comes straight back underneath, and you never lose the trail of who said what.

This article covers opening a thread, sending a reply, answering from your own inbox, using templates and merge fields, and sending from your own address.

Open the conversation

In the Leads inbox, click anywhere on a lead's row. The row expands to show the conversation thread: every email between you and the enquirer in order, oldest first, with a reply box underneath. Their original enquiry is summarised on the lead row itself, so a brand new lead you haven't answered yet opens with an empty thread and a ready composer. Opening the thread also marks any unread reply as read, clearing the red badge on the row.

Send a reply

Type your message in the reply box. There's a subject line above it (it defaults to "Re: your enquiry", change it if you like) and the message body below. Click Send reply and it goes out as an email from you to the enquirer.

Here's the part that makes it a real conversation rather than a one-way send: when the lead replies to your email, their response comes straight back into this thread, live, without you doing anything. You don't have to go hunting in a separate mailbox, and the next person who opens the lead sees the full back-and-forth. If a reply lands while you're elsewhere in the inbox, the lead's row picks up an unread badge so you know to look.

Half-written replies are saved for you

You often need something from elsewhere in 1pm partway through a reply: a price off a quote, a date off the calendar. Go and get it. Your reply is saved as you type, so when you come back to the lead it's exactly where you left it, subject and all.

A saved draft is yours alone. If you share the account, the person beside you sees their own drafts on the same lead, never yours. Nothing is sent until you press Send reply, and if you decide against it, Discard draft clears the box.

Attaching files

Two buttons sit under the reply box. Attach from Files picks something already in your Files library, a menu or a terms PDF you send often. Upload a file takes a PDF or an image, up to 10 MB each, straight off your computer.

Files upload the moment you choose them, while you carry on typing, so pressing Send doesn't leave you waiting. It also means a file that's too large, or the wrong sort, is refused there and then rather than after you've written the whole message. Attachments stay on an unsent draft the same way the words do, so wandering off mid-reply doesn't cost you them.

One limit worth knowing: files attached to a reply you never send are kept for 60 days, then tidied away. The draft's text stays longer. If that happens, the reply box tells you how many files went so you can attach them again. Anything you actually send is kept with the message on the thread and isn't affected.

Replying from your own inbox

You don't have to be in 1pm to answer a lead. When a lead replies, 1pm emails you a notification, and you can reply to that notification straight from your own email app: Gmail, Outlook, your phone on the way to a site visit. Your answer goes to the lead, and the same message is recorded in the 1pm thread, so the conversation reads the same whether you sent it from the app or from your inbox.

Three things are worth knowing before you rely on it:

  • Reply from an address 1pm recognises, which means your 1pm login, the login of anyone you share the account with, or the inbox your lead notifications go to. Reply from the inbox the notification arrived in and you are fine. From an address 1pm has never seen, it cannot tell you from the lead, so it will not pass the message on.
  • The lead never sees your personal address. Your reply is re-sent from your venue's sending address, exactly as if you had typed it into the thread.
  • Attachments come along, and are saved on the thread with the message.

If a reply cannot be sent, you get an email back saying so, and the thread shows it with a one-click retry. How lead reply emails work covers the whole route in detail, including what the lead sees at their end.

Reply templates

The replies a venue sends are often the same handful: a pricing and packages note, a "sorry, that date's already booked", a warm first thank-you. Save those once and reuse them.

Go to Leads, then Reply templates (there's a button at the top of the inbox, and a link in the sidebar). Give each template a name, an optional subject, and a body. Once you've saved a template, an Insert a template dropdown appears above the reply box in every thread: pick one and it fills the subject and body for you. You can edit the text before sending, so a template is a starting point, not a straitjacket.

Merge fields

Templates can carry merge fields, little tokens that get swapped for the lead's own details when you send. While editing a template, click a field to drop it in at your cursor:

  • [first name] becomes the enquirer's first name
  • [surname] becomes their last name
  • [name] becomes their full name
  • [event type] becomes the type of event they entered
  • [event date] becomes their event date, written out in full
  • [guests] becomes the guest count they gave

So "Hi [first name], thanks for asking about your [event type] on [event date]..." comes out personalised on every send. If a lead didn't give a particular detail, its field simply comes out blank.

Send from your own address

By default, your replies and acknowledgements go from [email protected], and replies still come back to you. If you'd rather the email come from your own domain (so it reads as [email protected]), you can set that up yourself from Profile, then Enquiry sending domain: enter the address you want, publish the DNS records it shows you (the usual DKIM and SPF entries), then click Verify. Once the domain verifies, your enquiry mail sends from your address automatically. Until then it keeps sending from the shared [email protected] default, so nothing breaks while you set it up. See verifying your sending domain for the full walkthrough.

A note on spam leads

You can reply to any lead except one you've marked as spam. That's deliberate: marking something spam takes it out of your working conversation, and 1pm never emails a spam sender.

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