The concern: We are building out our digital journey for our scale segment of customers, and are finding that many customers feel bombarded by email journeys that send separate communication threads for every touchpoint in a related journey.
Additionally, sending a separate thread for each email within a program makes it feel very obvious that emails are automated and not human-touch. Allowing threading would allow us to build in some more human-like touches and follow-ups for our team without the need to actually intervene. This is especially helpful for our scale customers since our CSMs work in a pooled model.
The ask: enable some feature that allows for us to configure email programs that send subsequent communications in the initial email thread so that customers have a single place to see all related messages. I think a boolean field would be the most user-friendly for admins, similar to the checkbox in settings to log outreach to timeline. (Bonus would be having this available alongside or after the functionality for timeline activities to be threaded!)
“Workarounds” today: Our CSM was super helpful and provided some suggestions to give customers a better experience - however, they don’t entirely solve for our use case, but sharing in case they help some of you out:
- Add “Re:” as a prefix to the subject of subsequent emails to make it appear as if they’re threaded - this helps customers see that emails are related AND that they have received a prior communication about a particular topic; in some cases, users may not realize emails are not actually within a single thread. (Should out to
@sarahmiracle who gave us the same suggestion in the Slack community!
) This doesn’t solve for our use case because our customers are unhappy with the number of related threads in their inbox regardless of how they’re titled. - Use a date field for “last communication sent” in GS to filter recipients out of messages/decrease the volume they receive in a given period - this is a good way to prevent scale customers from receiving too many emails BUT doesn’t work in our particular case because the communications are part of the same digital journey
- Use a different feature that supports threading for communications - other mass communication features in Gainsight do support threading, such as logging emails via Gainsight Assist from your inbox OR using Group Send to initiate and following up on communications from your inbox. This doesn’t support our scale use case because we want to automate multiple related touches, but is a great suggestion for viewing email threads from Gainsight for CSMs performing mass manual touches.
Thanks for your attention here! Open to any other workarounds or suggestions folks have in the meanwhile - though I think our only other option is to use an alternate tool for this use case right now 
