What is Reply Mail Management?
A Unified Messaging feature
Salesforce announced the end of the Do Not Reply era (aka Shoot & Forget) at CNX ’25. With Marketing Cloud Next, are moving towards conversational marketing. Reply Mail Management, a feature of Unified Messaging, allows you to automatically reply to incoming email messages after an Email Campaign, delete unwanted responses, and forward messages to a specific inbox to review later.
How does RMM work?
When you send a message from MCG/A and Reply Mail Management is activated, the platform forges an email address used to send the reply. If your Authenticated Domain is my.domain.com and your sender is sales@ my.domain.com, it will be something like [email protected]. In that example reply.my.domain.com is one of the CNAME you are required to create to authenticate the sending Domain, which defines a SMTP server (MX). When receiving a reply, this server then triggers a workflow as show below (the xyz string is actually defining the needed context).
If you’re organizing brands, defaults, and asset governance, review Unlock your CMS Workspaces in Marketing Cloud Next.
Let’s setup RMM
Authenticated Domain
First you need to create an Authenticated Domain to be used as a Sender Domain. Marketing Cloud Next recommends to use a subdomain for this. You may already have such a Domain, but if not, just search for “Authenticated Domains” in the Setup and click +Add Domain. You will be prompted to create 9 domains (including a specific CNAME subdomain to handle replies). Once the DNS records are propagated, your Domain can be authenticated.
Activate RMM
Go to Authenticated Domain > Show Details next to your Domain.
You’ll see several Tabs, one for the DNS Records, one for From Addresses, in MCG/A, your sender must be declared here, and Reply Mail Management.
This is pretty much all you need to do to activate RMM. Now, let’s see the features.
Reply Mail Management features
These are the one you find in the Setup Page. Let’s describe them.
Delete Auto replies and Out-of-Office
This feature is in the Reply Filters section. If activated, all the detected automatic messages (“I am currently on holidays…”, etc), will simply be discarded.
This is a cool feature, to focus on actual replies from your targets.
Responses
In the Responses section, you can create automated responses.
If None is selected, then your Prospects won’t receive any response if they answer your emails sent from the Campaign. If Create an Auto Reply Messageis selected, they will receive the message you define. So far, there is no Merge Field in the message for personalization but it is perfect to acknowledge you received the reply and will handle it, or to specify a change. This message will be sent from the original sender.
Routing
This option is independent from the previous one. You can forward a reply from your prospect answer to a generic email address. Only non-filtered emails from the Delete Auto replies and Out-of-Office step will be passed.
When a recepient of your Email Campaing answers the Email, the reply is not sent to the sender, rather it is sent to the Routing Address you define (provided you selected Yes, for Email Forwarding Enabled). This message will be sent from the original sender.
If you don’t specify an email address, the documentations states that incoming messages are logged and deleted.
For advanced layouts and code-level control when building replies and follow-ups, see HTML emails: drag & drop vs code mode.
Bonus: Unsubscribe Management
If a reply RMM receives contains one of the following term:
- unsubscribe
- opt-out
- remove
- stop
Then, your recipient Email Address will be unsubscribed from the Subscription the original Email was sent from.
Final Thoughts
Dynamic Sender
As of today, MCG/A does not support dynamic senders. You must select which sender will be used in the sending Flow. There is no way to specify something like “send from assigned sales rep”. This is surely due to the fact that Unified Individuals may be composed of mutilple Individuals. You can emulate this, if you have a limited number of Sales Rep by creating one Flow per sender and by using a Decision Split and select a distinct sender in each branch.
Then, as stated above, the reply is not sent to the sender, rather it is sent to the Routing Address you select. As the forwarded message copy contains the original sender, you may leverage this information by creating a filter in your mailing system to redirect the reply to the correct Sales Rep. It may be useful if you have a small number of Sales Reps.
Spam
In our testings, the forwarded reply falled into the Spam directory. The reply message is included in text format.
Activity
The Reply event is logged in the Email Engagement DMO and hence displayed on Prospect, Leads and Contacts if you simply added the Data Cloud Profile Engagement widget. However the reply copy does not appear to be added in the DMO itself.
