What are email agents and how do they help my emails reach the inbox?

Email agents are the recommended way to send email marketing in Votel. Instead of building a sequence in a workflow, you load the email agent with your email campaigns and it decides which email to send to which person and when. You do not build any automation or plan a sequence order.

Inbox providers such as Gmail and Yahoo decide between the inbox, the promotions tab and spam mostly by how people interact with your email (opens, clicks and replies), not only by keywords. If people do not engage, that is a strong signal they do not want your email. The email agent is built to get the highest open, click and reply rates and to teach email providers that people want your email. It does this automatically:

1. Engagement tiers. It sorts your contacts into engagement tiers. Hot people are those who clicked, replied or opened more than once in the last 30 days.
2. Sending in waves. Each email goes first to your openers, clickers and new contacts, so mailbox providers see strong engagement and place it in the inbox. Then it goes to the rest.
3. Win back budget. People who do not open or click only receive a limited share of your sends, 10 percent by default. For them the agent picks your best performing emails, judged by open rate and click to open rate from your campaign stats, to try to win them back without hurting your engagement.
4. Warm up. Sending scales up or down with your stats. If your stats are good it keeps doubling your volume. If your bounce or complaint rates are high it steps back and halves your volume. This also helps when you already have a large list of leads.
5. Send time optimization. It sends when each person is likely to be in their inbox, which gives the best chance of an open. This is on by default.

You do not need to change the agent's settings. You just create campaigns.

A normal workflow that sends an email, waits and sends another has no intelligence: it keeps emailing people who do not open, regardless of performance. This behavior cannot be built in the workflow builder. Email agents live in the email campaigns area. Workflow email sequences (an email step, a wait step, another email step) are still available if you want a fixed sequence, and you can ask the AI assistant to build one for you.

Use email agents for your own business and for your clients, for every lead you collect, such as trial forms, lead magnets and business cards from events. They are for your own list, not for cold email.