Inbox

The inbox allows you to view all inbound messages over the past 90 days, and is a highly effective way of managing conversations with your contacts in real time, to provide an organic engagement experience to your customers.

The inbox is found in the main menu:

When you open the inbox, you are presented with the following view:

There are some features here to help you manage your inbox effectively:

1. Open messages tab - this is the default tab where all of your "open" or "active" messages are found. When you are finished with a conversation and no longer want it to appear in the open bucket, you can mark the message as closed.

2. Closed messages tab - this tab is where all "closed" or "archived" messages are found. You cannot respond to a message that is in a closed status; however your contacts can still continue the conversation by sending you an inbound message. When an inbound message is received to a closed conversation, it is automatically moved back to "open."

3. Search field - you can search your inbox for conversations relating to specific contacts or numbers by entering the contact name or number here and clicking on the search icon.

4. Conversation Filter - you can filter your inbox to show all conversations, or only read or unread messages. This is helpful when managing larger campaigns and you need to quickly identify messages requiring a response.

5. Conversation list - here you will find all of your conversations. To open a conversations, simply click on it. Conversations containing unread messages will be presented with a number showing the number of unread messages contained within the conversation:

When you open a conversation you will be presented with the following view:

There are more features here to help you manage the conversation:

1. Search field - you can search the conversation for specific information. This is especially helpful when you need to go back and find specific messages containing important information, e.g. reference numbers or email addresses.

2. "Close" action - clicking on this will close the conversation. Once the conversation is closed, this option changes to "Open" whereby you can re-open the conversation should you wish to respond further.

3. "Unsubscribe" action - clicking on this will put the contact in an unsubscribed status, meaning that they will no longer be able to receive messages. Once clicked, this action becomes "Subscribe" whereby you can re-subscribe the contact.

Note: If the contact responds to a message with one of your opt-out keywords, they will automatically become unsubscribed and you will not be able to send further messages.

4. Conversation pane - outbound messages appear on the right in blue, and inbound messages appear on the left in grey. By hovering over an inbound message, you will see three dots appear next to it. Clicking on these will present the option to mark a message as unread:

This is especially helpful if you have multiple people managing the same inbox and you want someone else to be aware of this message, or if you simply want to leave it unread to remind yourself that it requires attention later on.

5. Templates - if you have any saved templates, you can select them from here to add to your message

6. Message content - write your message here. Note that the character count and SMS count are shown below this box to help you manage your usage.

Things to note

• Conversations will only appear in the inbox when an inbound message is received. This means that if you send an outbound message that does not receive a response, it will not appear in the inbox.
• If you send a broadcast to a list of contacts and someone sends a response, then the conversation that appears in the inbox will relate only to that specific contact (i.e. sending a reply back will only go to the contact who sent you the response, not the entire contact list).
• Conversation strings will be constant for each contact, regardless of the number from which the message was sent. This means that if you are sending via the shared numbers pool, even though the recipient will receive each message from a different number, their responses will always appear in the same conversation string in your inbox.
• Conversations are not unique to each broadcast. If you send multiple broadcasts to the same contact and get a response, you may not be able to see which message the response relates to:

In this scenario, we recommend using the Broadcast Reporting function which does show you which responses relate to which broadcasts: