Email reply tracking

When you say the CTA is to "reply directly to an email", do you mean there's a link in the email to initiate that reply; or are you talking about physically hitting "reply" in the email client?

Marketo does have a support for Outlook and Gmail plugin where the emails activities are directly tracked inside Marketo.

Send and Track an Email with the Email Add-In for Outlook - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Which email client are you talking about?

MJ

(Please note: what follows does not actually fulfill the requirement of the idea since it does not work within Marketo but presents a mostly manual solution that can be used outside of Marketo for those that are interested in at least a short term solution until something better comes along.)

We've successfully implemented a solution to track literal email replies. We're still new at it, we've only done it for 4 sends thus far, but it's already considered a success.

DISCLAIMER:
1) For us, this solution did require cooperation from IT. Specifically, work with our Exchange Server Admin.
2) It's also not easily scalable as it requires mostly manual work to generate the data. It is possible to automate a small part of the process and we're moving towards that. Given that we're working with actual replies though the numbers may be manageable for some.

I realize that one or both of these may mean this is not a viable solution for some. For us it's worth the effort since a large part of our emails are specifically for sales enablement to SQLs and actual paying customers (cross sell/up sell and stay in touch campaigns) that are assigned to sales reps. We are attempting to lessen the manual work but even if we make no further progress I imagine we'll still continue because of the benefits. It was pretty sweet to be able to add a "Replies" column and a "Reply to Opened Ratio" to our email analytics (via a spreadsheet after exporting the Marketo report).

QUICK OVERVIEW

1) Every email that we want to track replies has a special code at the very end of the body text.  (the last text of the email)

2) When a recipient replies to an email containing this code, our Exchange Server is set to automatically forward a copy of the reply to a marketing-managed email account.

3) All replies show up in this inbox as if the recipient replied directly to this email account.

4) Manage and assess replies accordingly.

SOME DETAIL

As you can see from the overview, It's a pretty straightforward solution. It's probably the disclaimer concerns that are more of an issue, not the complexity of the solution.

The Code:

We settled on a prefix of "MKTO" and a suffix, separated by space, that identifies the campaign and the email ID. For example "MKTO ABC01" might be the code for the first email of the ABC campaign. We also made the font of the code 8 point and white, so it's "invisible" and tiny. Probably harmless to have it visible but that's the route we took. The filtering and forwarding at the email server is only based on the prefix, so it's "set it and forget it" for IT, yet I can segment on campaign and email ID upon receipt of the replies.

Management of Replies in the Inbox:

Once in the inbox of course various tactics can be used in most email clients to group the replies based on the codes: search, rules, tags, etc. We started off with a simple search of the inbox for codes but are moving to setting up Outlook Rules to automatically move emails into folders as they come in.

If you simply wanted to count the number of replies you get then you would be done. Most I suspect, like us, will want to know how many responded to the primary CTA of the email, plus any secondary concerns, and tally those up. Again this is very manual (but easily offloaded to an intern or admin asst) but right now we're reading each reply and dropping them into one of several sub-folders depending on the type of response. We're then simply counting the replies in each folder to get some pretty helpful data.

Important Note: Since the server blindly forwards emails containing the code prefix this means that all future replies to the email from recipients to the sender will also be forwarded. In other words the email thread is forwarded, at least the emails sent by the recipient to the sender. Right now we're manually deleted dupes as we see them.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you can get IT's help and deal with the manual nature of things then I can't overstate the value of the data you can get from a solution like this, at least if you're sending a lot of emails to bottom-of-the-funnel recipients like we are.  It's simply another way to directly demonstrate marketing's contribution to revenue. It goes a long way towards sales and marketing alignment and greatly enhances the sales enablement effort. We work closely with sales, and talk to the reps themselves, to know how we can continue to improve, help them do their job better and generate more revenue.

This solution is not for everyone but for those where it might be a good fit, I hope this helps!