Remove a lead from a SharpSpring email nurture campaign when they reply to an email

SUCCESS! A lead has responded to your nurture email and they’re on their way into a sales pipeline. But now they don’t need to receive any more nurture emails.

Read through this guide as I explain the technique I used to accomplish this task and remove the lead from automated emails.

This technique is setup for Gmail or Office 365 only and does require a Zapier account.

Step 1: Setup your emails and inbox rules

Automation requires a trigger to start, and the trigger used in this automation is “when an email is added to a specific folder/label in your mailbox“. Basically, anytime an email lands in your inbox with a unique string of words, we’re going to add this email to a label/folder which will trigger the automation.

Add a unique string of words to every email in the nurture campaign

In your email editor, add a string of text like [my unique string of words] to the footer of EACH email. This string of words shouldn’t be used in normal emails from recipients, since the automation could run into problems.

Add incoming emails matching the string to a label/folder automatically

In your email settings (Gmail or Office 365), go to settings and create a filter (Gmail) or rule (Office 365).

Choose “When a the email contains the words” and type in the unique string: [my unique string of words].

Step 2: Setup the Zap automation

Now you’ve setup the rule to apply/add an email to a label/folder, you can setup the Zapier trigger to run when a New Email is added to a specific mailbox.

In the example below, we have used a Gmail label called “Nurture Email Reply” as the trigger to run our automation.

Connect your SharpSpring account

There’s always an action that follows the trigger. Now we can update a lead in SharpSpring by applying a [True] value to a boolean type custom-field called [Has Replied To A “sales Email”].

Step 3: Remove the lead from nurture emails in SharpSpring

Because Zapier UPDATES a lead field through automation, we can run a Visual Workflow in SharpSpring when [Has Replied To A “sales Email”] field changes to [TRUE].

The following action is: Remove from [Nurture campaign action-group].

Final thoughts

I hope this technique has helped you understand how to remove a lead from a SharpSpring email nurture campaign when they reply to an email. It’s entirely possible to add multiple inboxes for different nurture campaigns, but generally as soon a lead takes the bait, they should be in your line of sight and ready to convert into a sale.

At Merci, we consider ourselves experts at using Zapier to connect cloud-based apps together. So if you don’t have a Zapier account or the experience, just get in contact and we can help you out.

Good luck and let me know how you get on!