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Replies and Routing
Somebody replied. That's good, and it creates a structural problem: the prospect replied to an inbox on a domain you bought, with a persona's name on it, and the human who should answer is a rep with a real address at your real company. This lesson is about how that gap gets closed.
🕳️ The Gap
Think about what the prospect sees. They got an email from a person, at a company sounding domain, and they hit reply. As far as they're concerned, they're talking to that person.
Two things have to be true at once. Their answer has to reach the right rep, and that rep's response has to come back on the same thread, so nothing looks strange from the prospect's side.
🔗 How Clay Closes It
It comes back to a decision you made much earlier.
When you bought inboxes, personas could be created from the people on your team. In the settings lesson, round robin rep assignment mapped leads to specific reps. Open the Sender accounts tab and the Rep column is where both of those pay off: each account has an owner, so any reply arriving on that account routes to that person. You can group by rep to see the book split out.
Say two reps split the territory. Their prospects get mail from their own personas, and when those prospects reply, the answers land with the rep who owns them.
📬 Three Ways to Answer
Three paths, and they suit different teams.
- The rep's own inbox. Replies get forwarded, the rep answers from the tool they already live in, and they never sign into Clay. Realistically most reps land here, and the Clay team expects it. Reps have enough tools.
- The rep view inside Clay, scoped so a rep only sees the accounts they own. The global inbox lesson covers it properly.
- A drafted reply approved in Slack. Clay drafts, the rep approves or edits, and it goes out. A human still reads every response, but nobody is writing from scratch.
The third is the middle path, and it's the one to point most teams toward if they want to move faster without losing the plot.
Whichever path you pick, the reply goes out from the exact account that sent the original, so the thread stays intact for the prospect.
🧹 Triage
From the reply itself you can respond, forward, mark it read or unread, apply a category, or blocklist.
Blocklisting is the one to be quick about. When somebody asks to be left alone, this guarantees it: that address never receives another email from this workspace, from any campaign, unless somebody takes them off the list on purpose.
Do it immediately. Same day. There's no version of this where waiting helps you.
Your rep stops prospecting and starts responding. They're not building lists or writing first touches. They're picking up conversations that already started.
🚀 What's Next
You now know how a reply to an alt-domain inbox reaches the right human, which of the three answering paths fits your team, and why a blocklist request gets handled the day it arrives.
Next we zoom out to the workspace level and look at every campaign at once.
