New in Reply: Consolidated Inbox, Accounts, Data in Sequence Wizard, and More

Consolidated Inbox out of Beta

First delivered to Beta back in December, the Consolidated Inbox offered a unified space to access and manage messages from your whole team to help you save time and facilitate collaboration in handling replies.

With this release, the new Inbox is officially out of Beta and available to everyone!

You can find the new Inbox in the main top menu. This is also where you’ll see a notification indicator once you get a new reply so you can get back to the prospect in a matter of seconds. Considering user feedback, we’ve also introduced the ability to access the new Inbox on a sequence level. So you can get all the benefits of the updated Inbox (improved UI, new features, convenient follow-up process, AI draft tool) without compromising your productivity.

Along with the unified experience, we’re bringing email sorting to our new Inbox. Namely, Reply will categorize the incoming email replies automatically based on their tone using AI. This helps you focus on “interested” leads that are most likely to convert, which is a huge benefit for busy SDR/BDR teams.

You can also create custom categories in your Inbox to tag conversation threads with greater precision. And the best part is that all categories – both standard and custom – are supported in native integrations to make it easy to sync the interested leads from Reply to your CRM and other apps. At the same time, you can choose to view only your messages or the messages from the whole team from all sequences which allows you to switch your focus if needed.

With the public feature release, we’re also bringing some smaller improvements to the Inbox, including: 

• “Unread” filter – so you can quickly sort out the unread emails in your Inbox, making sure you never miss a message.
• Inbox search to help you quickly find any message thread by the contact’s first/last name, email address, the subject line.
• Access a contact profile right in the Inbox so you don’t have to switch to the People page for contact information anymore.
• Create custom categories in the Inbox without diving inside the message threads so you can accurately mark the tone of voice of each client, making it easier for you to stay on top of the important conversations. You can also change the categories assigned automatically.
• CC’d & BCC’d users displayed in the Inbox for complete transparency in email communication.
• Automated response handling in the Inbox to hide auto-replies, out-of-office messages, or bounce messages. 
• Manage categories in a more intuitive way, i.e., easily remove categories from individual threads in a click to streamline the process. You can also assign/remove categories and subcategories to/from a message thread in the same window to save time.
• Split pane mode for those of you who prefer Outlook-style inboxes. You can enable it and make it your default Inbox view. 

Learn more about our new Consolidated Inbox here.

Accounts out of Beta

First released in Beta as an MVP back in July 2022, Accounts in Reply is a long-anticipated addition to our sales engagement platform, allowing our users to level up their account-based selling efforts.

Simply put, an account refers to a company or organization, like Reply or Salesforce, that has multiple prospects associated with it. As a result, the Accounts feature in Reply makes it easy to access all the information about the company and all related contacts so that you can choose the right person to reach out to.

To enable Accounts in Reply, go to the People → Accounts tab and click the Enable Accounts button. Once the setup is complete, you will be able to view and manage your existing accounts, quickly create new ones, and add more contacts to those accounts in a single dedicated tab.

You can either create a new account in Reply manually or import multiple accounts at once from a CSV file. For a more in-depth overview of the Accounts page, see this article.

All in all, we hope that Accounts functionality will be particularly helpful to sales development teams focused on account-based selling tactics in outreach and engagement. Down the road, this will allow us to provide visibility into accounts and implement account-based analytics for our customers. So be sure to take Accounts for a spin!

​​Individual account page

As mentioned above, the Accounts page lists all the companies created manually or automatically (based on the contact information). To access and manage contacts and activities related to each individual account, click on the account’s name in the grid to see the Individual account page and the Account sidebar.

The Individual account page allows you to manage both the account and the contacts associated with it, making it an excellent alternative to CRM solutions. You can access all the information related to the company as well as the activities carried out by you and your team members. This is a huge timesaver that can help you streamline your workflow and get more done in less time.

The account’s sidebar on the right displays all the information about the account, which you can also edit. Learn more about it here. You can hide or open the account sidebar anytime using the < > arrow buttons.

The individual account page includes several tabs:

• Activity tab displays all the activities related to the contacts associated with the account, made by all team members.
• Notes tab lists all notes made by all team members that relate to the account.
• Contacts tab lists all the contacts linked to the account. You can also manage the contacts from here.
• Logs tab shows all the activities performed by all team members on the account.

All in all, this should help you implement account-based selling tactics, which is aimed at increasing sales efficiency by focusing on high-value accounts and the individuals within them.

Account stages

One noteworthy addition to the Accounts page is the Stage column that is shown in the grid beside each account. The account “stage” refers to the different phases or steps in your sales engagement process – from initial contact to finalizing the deal.

These stages can vary depending on your processes, but generally include such values as new, qualified, negotiating, meeting booked, on hold, closed-won, and more. You can find more info on each account stage in this article.

The stages of accounts are shown as labels in the Accounts tab, on the individual account page, and in the account’s profile sidebar.

By tracking the stages of accounts, you can closely follow your outreach pipeline and make sure you are making progress toward your goals. This can help you prioritize your efforts and allocate resources more effectively.

Reply Data in Sequence Wizard and more improvements

The heart and soul of our platform, sequences are getting some long-anticipated updates as well. Namely, we’re happy to introduce the ability to pull prospect contacts from our Data product right into the Sequence Wizard as well as automatically save your sequences (either manually created or generated by AI) mid-way through the setup process.

Pull contacts from Reply Data directly into the Sequence Wizard

If you still haven’t tried our Data product, you totally should! It’s 100% free (with 10k data credits per month per team) and perfectly integrates with our core sales engagement platform so you can easily pull the contacts right into the sequence!

Access thousands of contacts from our database of 140 million contacts. It’s designed to save you time and effort when it comes to finding the contacts you need. Simply set your specific parameters for finding the contacts and we’ll build a targeted list that you can use in the sequence. 

But there’s more to come! We’ll be building on this feature to allow our AI assistant to search for the ideal contacts that match your customer profile automatically. This means that you’ll no longer have to spend hours searching for the right contacts, but instead will be able to target your audience more effectively with AI-generated lists.

More product updates

Those are the major Reply features coming to you with the recent releases. But there are some more Easter eggs we have to share. These are the updates to HubSpot and Zapier integrations. 

• Using saved lists as a filtering option in People sync from HubSpot to Reply. This is aimed at making it easier for users to filter their contacts on the HubSpot side and then sync the contacts to Reply.

• Passing account field to Reply via Zapier. The ability to import prospects from any platform via Zapier and connect them to accounts in Reply should contribute to more efficient lead generation and management.

Wrapping up

These are all the major updates in Reply so far. Try out these new features and don’t hesitate to contact our support team if you require any assistance or run into any issues.

And keep an eye out as we have some exciting new features and enhancements coming your way in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!