About Your Mailchimp Inbox
Online marketing relies on connecting with your audience members, so it’s important to take the time to talk to contacts directly. When people reply to your email campaigns, use Mailchimp’s Inbox feature to view and respond to their messages in your Mailchimp account. Collect feedback, answer questions, and make a personal connection with your contacts.
In this article, you'll learn how to access and use Inbox.
Before you start
- This feature replaces Conversations. We will continue to develop it as we collect feedback and make changes.
- Each audience in your Mailchimp account has its own Inbox.
How it works
Mailchimp Inbox is a manager for 1-to-1 emails between you and your contacts. For each audience, Mailchimp creates an uneditable reply-to email address that tracks replies in Mailchimp and links them to specific reports. This address will appear to your recipients as a randomly generated series of numbers followed by @inbound.mailchimpapp.net.
When a contact replies to your email campaign that has Inbox settings enabled, we’ll save those replies in both their individual contact profiles and your Mailchimp Inbox. Any account user with Manager status or above can then view and respond to contacts without leaving Mailchimp.
Enable Inbox in an email
To make sure email replies go to your Mailchimp Inbox, navigate to the Settings & Tracking section of the email builder and check the box next to Use Inbox to manage replies.
To manage email replies from an automation, copy the From address in your Inbox settings and paste it into the From email address field in your automation settings.
About Inbox Opt-Out
The Opt-Out Footer is an unsubscribe link specifically for 1-to-1 messages sent from your Mailchimp Inbox. It gives your contacts more choice over communications they receive and helps you comply with applicable data protection and anti-spam requirements, as required by our Terms of Use. This will not affect your contacts’ unsubscribe preferences with respect to your email marketing campaigns sent through Mailchimp.
When to use the Opt-Out Footer
If you use your Mailchimp Inbox to send a message that contains marketing content, you may need to turn on this footer to comply with applicable law. You may want to consult with legal counsel to determine the requirements in your jurisdiction.
How does the Opt-Out Footer work?
When a contact opts out of 1-to-1 messages via this footer, you can no longer send them 1-to-1 messages from your Mailchimp Inbox. This does not affect the contact’s status in your audience with respect to email marketing campaigns sent through Mailchimp, but rather creates a new preference for 1-to-1 messages sent from your Mailchimp Inbox. This preference will be reflected in the contact’s profile.
If a contact opts out of 1-to-1 messages and subsequently replies to an email campaign or reaches you directly at your Inbox address, you will be able to respond to that message.
Access Inbox
To access your Mailchimp Inbox, follow these steps.
- Click the Audience icon.
- Click Audience dashboard.
- If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
- In the Messages Inbox section, click View Inbox.
Success! You've accessed your Inbox, which is organized by default into three main folders: Active, Complete, and Trash. You can also use custom labels to create new folders.
View and manage messages
New and ongoing message threads will appear as Active. Click a message to view it along with any replies.
If you’d like to respond to a message, click Reply to compose a new response. Here are some other actions you can take.
- Mark as complete Moves a message thread to the Complete folder of your Inbox. When a conversation is finished, this gets it out of the way.
- Trash Moves a message thread to the Trash folder. Messages will not be permanently removed from your Inbox unless a contact is permanently deleted from an audience.
- Label Apply or remove labels to organize your message threads by topic or with related details.
- Tag contact Apply or remove tags to a contact based on how your conversation is going or what they might need.
Manage responses
With Inbox, you can see what your teammates are doing in real time. If another account user logs in and views the Inbox, you’ll see that they’re online, what message they’re reading, and whether they’re typing out a response. This helps prevent duplicate replies.
Send a new message
Open a message thread and click Reply to continue an ongoing conversation, or click Compose New Message to start a brand new conversation with someone in your audience.
In the To section, search for the contact you want to message. Then, add a Subject, edit your Replying as details as needed, and enter and format your message. If you want to include a file, click Add attachment and choose one from your computer.
Last, choose whether to enable the Opt-out footer.
Send a new message from the contact profile
You can also directly send a message to a contact from their profile page. Click on the contact’s email address, or click the Actions drop-down and choose Send Message.
This will launch a new message window in Inbox.
Reply to a survey response
If you’re running a Mailchimp survey, click Send Message next to any text response to compose a new message to the respondent.
You can also hover over a respondent's name or email, if provided, and click Send Message.
Manage settings
Access your Inbox settings to edit your From name, view or copy your From address, and choose which notifications you want to receive.
Choose your From name
Depending on your business, you may be comfortable responding as yourself. Other times, you may want to use a company name to respond. Click the Settings option in the top navigation bar to choose whether messages come from you, your company name, or both.
View your From email address
This is the uneditable reply-to email address that tracks replies in Mailchimp and links them to specific reports. You can also use it to forward messages from other services or email providers to Inbox.
Note
We do not recommend using this address as an embedded mailto: link on your website.
Manage browser notifications
Inbox can send you browser notifications to ensure that you see new messages right away. To enable browser notifications, go to Settings and toggle on New message browser notifications. You’ll have to tell your browser to allow notifications from Mailchimp. Keep in mind that notifications will only display if you have Inbox open in a browser tab.
Manage email notifications
Inbox can send email notifications to any user who is Manager level or higher. To enable email notifications, go to Settings and toggle on any user that you want to receive email notifications.
Forward messages to Inbox
Each Mailchimp Inbox has a unique email address that delivers messages to the Inbox. You can use this address to forward messages from other services. For example, if you have a specific email address for your customer support, you can use your Mailchimp Inbox’s unique email address to forward emails from your customer support address to your Mailchimp Inbox in order to respond. To do this, access your Mailchimp Inbox settings and copy the From email address.
Then, log in to that support email account and add your Mailchimp From address as a forwarding address. If you forward an email to your Mailchimp Inbox from someone who is not currently in your audience, they will be added as a non-subscribed contact. To learn more about how contacts get added and what that means About your Contacts.