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Reply analytics

The Replies tab measures what happens after the send: subscribers writing back, and how well the AI handles those conversations. When a customer replies to one of your emails, SmartMailing drafts a grounded answer from your brand's knowledge base and routes it through an approval pipeline. This tab tracks how that pipeline performs.

Like the rest of Reports, everything here is per brand and scoped to the selected time window.

Reply volume​

The top cards summarize the window:

  • Total replies, split into inbound (real customer replies) and preview (drafts generated while testing)
  • AI answered: the share of replies where the AI produced a confident draft
  • Escalated: replies that needed a human because the AI could not answer confidently
  • Avg confidence: the average retrieval score behind the AI's drafts
  • Edited before send: how many AI drafts you changed before approving them
  • Avg time to resolve: average hours from a reply arriving to it being resolved

The edit rate is worth watching. If you are rewriting most drafts, your brand's knowledge base probably needs more or better source material.

AI auto-answer coverage​

A donut chart shows the split between replies the AI answered and replies it escalated to a human. The center shows the coverage percentage. Higher coverage means less inbox work for you; a rising escalation count usually means customers are asking about things the AI has no material for.

Approval funnel​

The funnel shows where replies currently sit in the review pipeline:

  • Pending approval: drafted, waiting for your review
  • Approved: reviewed and cleared to send
  • Sent: the answer went out
  • Rejected: you discarded the draft
  • Escalated to human: taken over manually

A pile-up in Pending approval means answers are drafted but nobody is reviewing them, which drags your average time to resolve.

Replies by campaign​

When replies are linked to campaigns, a table shows which campaigns spark conversations: each campaign's reply count and its reply rate (replies divided by delivered emails). Click a campaign name to open its full report.

This cuts both ways. A high reply rate on a genuine question-provoking campaign is engagement gold; a high reply rate full of "stop emailing me" is a targeting problem.

Preview data notice​

Until live inbound email is wired up for your brand, most rows come from preview drafts rather than real customer replies. When that is the case, the tab shows a notice saying so, and the numbers should be read as a rehearsal rather than production performance. Once real inbound replies flow in, the same metrics reflect live traffic.

If the tab is completely empty, no replies have been recorded in the window yet. The Open Replies button takes you to the replies workspace at /replies.