Conversations

View and start conversations with your accounts directly within Vitally

About Conversations

Striking the perfect balance of manual vs. automated customer engagement can be difficult. With Vitally's Conversations feature, you can create Playbooks to auto-schedule conversations at the right times and make manual edits when further personalization is needed. Let's dig in!

Set up Vitally Account to use Conversations

You'll likely want to do a few things before sending out conversations, such as set up your sending window, signature, sending limit, and enable unsubscribes.

  • Allowing unsubscribes help your Gmail reputation

  • Sending Limits also protect your Gmail reputation to avoid being marked as spam

  • Sending windows requires the conversation's send date to fall within the window. This is especially helpful when you don't want to send an email outside of business hours or weekends

  • Setting up your signature is an easy way to make an email more efficient

Unsubscribes, Sending Windows, Sending Limits, Signature

Unsubscribes

If you'd like to manage unsubscribes from your customer emails in Vitally, we provide a robust, configurable way to do so. You can enable this for all conversations created in your account (this is not a global setting) or change it for an individual conversation.

Even if you enable unsubscribes for all emails, you can still change this in an individual conversation.

Conversations: Enabling Unsubscribes

How-ToHow-To Visual

When using Vitally's unsubscribe functionality, you first need to enable it for your account.

  1. Navigate to your Settings (⚙️) by selecting your Account Logo on the top left

  2. Navigate to Activity-> Conversation Settings -> Unsubscribes

  3. There, you can define the copy Users see when including unsubscribe links in emails

  4. There are 2 configuration options - an "Unsubscribe prefix" and an "Unsubscribe link text"

    • The former displays in front of the actual unsubscribe link (e.g. "Rather not hear from me again?")

    • The latter is the actual link text (e.g. "Click here")

Enabling unsubscribes for specific conversations

There are often 2 types of customer emails so every conversation you start from Vitally can be configured to include the above unsubscribe link. The 2 types are usually:

  1. 'Helpful' ones you'd like the customer to read (e.g. new feature releases)

  2. 'Urgent' ones that are critical for them to read (e.g. deprecation warnings, credit card issues).

If the email is of 'urgent' type, you can opt to exclude the unsubscribe link/logic when sending that email. If you allow unsubscribes, 2 things happen when creating the conversation:

  1. Any past unsubscribed users will not be sent the conversation

  2. Conversations will include your above unsubscribe copy/link

If you uncheck the above "Allow Unsubscribes" option, all users will receive your conversation (including those that previously unsubscribed) and an unsubscribe link will not be included in the email. Uncheck wisely - allowing unsubscribes is a general best practice.

Viewing & managing unsubscribed users

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When viewing a Users Table View, you'll see an Unsubscribed column that tracks whether the user has unsubscribed from conversations. Like all columns, you can sort and filter users by this column.

Start a Conversation

There are two ways to start conversations with users:

  1. Automation - Using Playbook automation, you can automatically start a conversation with specific users at accounts matching a set of rules. Examples include auto-engage churn risks, welcome emails to new customers, etc.

  2. Manually - When navigating account and user lists, you can select specific orgs/accounts/users to start conversations with.

How-ToHow-To Visual

Automated via a Playbook:

Once you've created your playbook, you can add an action to start a Conversation:

  1. Add the action to Start a Conversation

  2. Select the From. You have two options:

    • You can choose to send from a Key Role (Sender Key Role)

    • Or from a specific person + channel (gmail, outlook, zendesk, intercom)

  3. If available, you can send from an alias (gmail & outlook only). You'll see an option below for "@ Send as" to select an alias email.

  4. Select the To. You can choose from:

    • Account Owners: This will target the assigned Account Owner

    • All Users: This will send to ALL users with a valid email address

    • Specific Users: You can add in filters to target only a subset of Users

    • Or Account Trait: You can use a trait to send a message to

  5. If you've select All Users or Specific Users you can also choose a Strategy

    • Start one conversation per user

    • Start a group conversation with users at the same account

  6. Add in a delay, if any

  7. Choose whether you want to allow and respect user unsubscribes or not

  8. Select your Undo Strategy. This is what should happen to unsent messages when an account stops matching the playbook's rules

  9. Create your message! You can make one from scratch or use a template on the right hand side.

More on conversation formatting below

  1. Whether using the Global Create button or the Arrow button in an account, continue below:

    • If using the Global Create button select the Account you're targeting

  2. Select the user(s) To send

  3. Select the From. You'll select the Sender + Channel (Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, Intercom, or Sendgrid)

  4. Select the Reply To, CC, BCC, and Attachments if any

    • Reply to is useful if you'd like to auto route and manage replies in tools like Front, Zendesk, etc.

  5. Select a Send Date if you want to send it later

    • All 'pending' conversations (i.e. those with a scheduled send date in the future) can be viewed, edited, and deleted in the new Conversations->Pending view in our navigation.

  6. Select your format, you can do Standard Rich Text Email or HTML!

  7. Create your message! Don't forget the Subject which is at the very top. You can make one from scratch or use a template on the right hand side.

  8. Choose whether you want to allow and respect user unsubscribes or not at the very bottom

More on conversation formatting below under Support Functionality.

Global Create Button:

In order for conversations to be tracked in Vitally, the User must live in Vitally. We can not pull in conversations with a User that does not live in Vitally. Additionally, Vitally can not filter out certain conversations - it's all or nothing.

HTML Emails

You can create conversation using HTML! This includes:

  • Composing and sending html emails

  • Composing and applying html email templates

  • Styling with style tag and inline styles

  • Variables in html emails

  • Previewing html emails

  • Sorting and filtering outbound messages by message format (html or rich text)

Just because we support HTML does not mean that your recipient does. This is dependent on their email client!

Create a Conversation Template

Creating a template allows you to efficiently send conversations to your customers. You can add personalization such as variables to ensure that these feel personalized.

How-ToHow-To Visual

How to create a Conversation Template:

  1. Navigate to your Settings (⚙️) by selecting your Account Logo on the top left

  2. Navigate to Templates --> Conversation Templates

  3. Select New template

  4. There you can choose whether the template is Private or public (Team)

  5. You can choose either Rich Text or HTML

  6. Add a description

  7. Add any attachments

  8. Add a category to easily filter by (only 1 category can be added)

  9. You can create a one-to-one and a group conversation message. These may be different if you are sending an individual vs a group email to users on the same account

    • You must have something in the one-to-one tab even if only using the group

  10. Add your subject and message!

  11. Once complete, select Create Template on the bottom right

Conversation Supported Functionality

Now that you've created your conversation, you can start building out your conversation content. There's a variety of supported functionality like commands (headings, bullet lists, variables, etc), team traits, conversation traits, and conversation delays. Let's dig in!

Alias, Team Trait, Conversation Traits, Commands, Playbook Delays

You can configure a custom sender alias to send emails from (e.g success@ or support@) for any emails configured to be sent via Gmail or Outlook.

If the configured Gmail/Outlook account can actually send from the configured alias email, then the email will be sent from that address (Google instructions & Outlook instructions on how to set that up) However, if your account isn't actually configured to allow sending from that alias, the email will still be sent by the primary Gmail/Outlook email.

When you've selected the from email, you'll see a "@ Send as" where you can select an alias email. If the email has dynamic senders (like it is sending from a key role), then the alias select is replaced by text boxes to enter an alias email.

Pending Conversations

Tools that fully automate emails/customer engagement can be a bit unforgiving. Typos and bad or missing data can lead to users receiving emails that have a very little chance of a response. For those reasons, we have a "Pending" stage for conversations prior to them being sent to users. Here's how that works! Pending Conversations can be created for a few reason:

  • When creating conversations, you always have an option to start the conversation at a later date or on a delay. If the conversation has this delay, we'll create the conversation as 'pending' with a scheduled date in the future for it to be sent to the user.

  • Every user in Vitally can define a Sending Window for their conversations, which requires the conversation's send date to fall within the window. If the conversation is scheduled to be sent but the send date falls outside the sender's window, we'll delay the conversation until the start of the next window.

  • Gmail has a Daily Sending Limit option, which defaults to 250. If the sender exceeds this limit for a given 24 hour period, we will wait until the sender is within the limit prior to sending any more conversations from their account. This option helps ensure your Gmail email has a high reputation and isn't flagged as spam.

There is an hourly limit of 60 emails per hour. This is strictly to help your reputation with gmail and avoid your reputation from deteriorating.

Create Conversations View

To view your pending conversation you can create a Table View! You can also create other types of Views, you can learn more about those HERE.

How-ToHow-To Visual
  1. Once you've created your Hub, select the + plus sign to Add a View inside

  2. You'll now see a pop-up with all your options where you will:

    1. Select Tables

    2. Select your Data Source as Pending Conversations or Active Conversations

    3. Name your Table View

    4. You can further customize by adding a Name and an Emoji

  3. Once your Table View has been created, you can start to add any filters to narrow down your results (CSM, trait filters, Segments, etc)

  4. Once you've added all your filters, don't forget to Save Changes on the top right

  5. All Hub members can view this table, but only you and those with edit access can edit it. You can grant additional view or edit access to any team member by selecting the Share button on the top right

Pending Conversations

Once in your Table View, we'll preview the message. If you'd like to make changes prior to the conversation being sent:

  1. Open the Conversation you want to edit

    1. You can edit the subject or body by clicking into the area

    2. You can edit the send date

    3. Or any other details of the conversations (To, CC, Bcc, etc)

Open and Reply Analytics

As emails are sent from Vitally, we inject a tracking pixel into the email to determine when your users view the email. You can view whether your users then open emails in 2 ways:

  1. Viewing if a specific message was opened

  2. Viewing open rates for a specific template

How toHow to Visual

Viewing if a specific message was opened

When viewing a conversation thread in Vitally, we'll show an indicator to the top right of the message indicating whether it has been seen yet.

Viewing email analytics for a specific template

If you use Playbooks to auto-send a specific template, or if you manually send a template from Vitally, we'll track all-time analytics of each of your templates.

To view email analytics follow the steps below:

  1. navigate to Conversation Settings -> Templates in your account settings (or get there via Quick Jump).

  2. There, we'll display analytics for all your templates such as:

    • Sent

    • Opened

    • Replied

    • Bounced

    • Unsubscribed

Conversation FAQ

Q: Why is there an active conversation under an Account that's not involved? A: If any participant of that email is a tracked User in Vitally and tied to multiple accounts, all conversations that User is included in will appear in all Accounts they're tied to. Q: Why am I seeing "An error occurred when trying to send this message: Message was not sent because it was scheduled to send more than 7 days ago" A: This could be for a few reasons like (1) no email address exists, (2) the email address is invalid, (3) there is an abundance of emails, and due to sending limits, it has passed the timeline of how many days we try to send emails. We will try to send for 3 days for “immediate send” and 7 days for scheduled send

Q: Where can I set up my email signature? A: Every user in Vitally can configure their own message signature within Settings > Profile.

Q: I started a group conversation with an account; how does the Playbook select who receives the email? A: We'll start a group conversation with the account owner, then the 9 next most recently seen users. We currently only allow for 10 recipients in each group conversation started.

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