Messaging your partners

Who is this article for?

This article will be useful to you if you are a company on PartnerStack, looking to communicate with individual partners or partner team members through the Messages tab.

Communicating with partners, whether to learn more about them or to answer questions about your company and partner program, is an important part of building partner relationships and trust.

Messages you send to partners are received in their Messages tab, and as emails if they have email notifications turned on for program messages.

Email campaigns are another great tool for when you want to reach all your partners, or specific groups or segments. For more information, see the Creating emails in PartnerStack support guide.

NEW: Support Agent. You can now let an AI agent answer your partners' questions in Messages and hand over the ones that need you. The agent is off by default. See Using the Support Agent in Messages to learn more.

How Messages works

For a video walkthrough of using the Discovery & Recruitment tool, see the Company dashboard: Video walkthroughs.

The Messages tab is a shared inbox, so your team can respond to partner messages together. A message read by one teammate is marked as read for all teammates.

Your Messages tab has two main sections: 

  • All messages: Read and unread messages
  • Unread messages: Unread messages only

As you read through and reply to messages in your Unread messages tab, they will be marked as read and moved to the All messages tab. Messages can be marked as unread if they require later follow-up or attention from a different teammate.

If you use the Support Agent

When the Support Agent is on, your inbox shows three views instead:

  • All messages: every conversation
  • Needs your attention: conversations the agent or a partner handed to you and need your reply
  • Agent handling: conversations the agent answered

The Messages count in your left menu shows the conversations that need you. For details, see Using the Support Agent in Messages.

Message a partner

To message a partner or partner team:

  1. Go to your All Partners tab and select the partner team you want to message.
  2. Click Message team to start a conversation with the whole team.
    Monosnap+Partner+Details+2024-04-29+13-58-47.png

Message a member of a partner team

To message a specific member of a team:

  1. Go to your All Partners tab and select the partner team you want to message.
  2. Scroll down to Partner Members.
  3. Click the team member you want to message.
  4. Click Message member.

Monosnap+Partner+Team+Member+Details+2024-04-29+13-58-10.png

Note: If a team only has one partner, you don't need to select a team member. Just use Message team.

Message attachments

Add up to 10 attachments per message. Supported attachments include images up to 30MB (JPEG, PNG, GIF) as well as PDFs and office documents up to 250MB.

Search, Filter, and Sort messages

Find the conversations you need quickly, without scrolling through your whole inbox.

Search messages

Use the search bar to find a conversation by partner name, member name, email, or partner key.

Filter messages

Under Filter by, narrow your conversations by:

  • Group: show conversations from partners in a specific group
  • Manager: show conversations for partners assigned to a specific program manager

To see only conversations you haven't read yet, turn on Show only unread.

Sort messages

Use Sort to order conversations by Newest first or Oldest first.

Tip: Use Oldest first to find partners who have been waiting the longest.

The conversation count above the list updates as you search and filter. To pull in new messages, click the refresh icon next to Last refreshed.

Note: Content Marketplace conversations aren't in Messages. You can find them in My requests.

Mark messages as unread

Make sure important messages get seen by marking them as unread in your shared inbox.

  1. In your Messages tab, open the message you want to mark as unread.
  2. In the top right corner, click Mark as unread and close the window.

Note: if you use the Support Agent, marking a message as unread doesn't move it into or out of Needs your attention. A conversation leaves Needs your attention only when you reply.

Managing email alerts for messages 

You can turn email notifications for incoming partner messages on or off.

To turn email alerts for messages on or off:

  1. Select your profile icon in the top right corner of your dashboard.
  2. Click Profile from the dropdown menu.
  3. Scroll down to the Email settings card.
  4. Toggle Chat notifications on or off.

Disabling messages

You can turn Messages on or off for each group, and show partners a custom message telling them how to reach your team. By default, Messages is turned on for all groups.

Note: If Messages is turned off for a group, partners in that group can't reply to email campaigns. The Support Agent also won't reply to partners in that group.

To turn off messages for a group:

  1. In the Groups tab, select the group.
  2. Open the group's Group settings tab.
  3. If Messages is on, click the green toggle to turn it off.
  4. Set a message to show partners in their Messages tab. We recommend including how you'd like partners to reach your team, such as your support email or a link to your support page.

To turn messages back on for a group:

  1. In the Groups tab, select the group.
  2. Open the group's Group settings tab.
  3. If Messages is off, click the red toggle to turn it on.