Lead auto-reply
Optionally text or email the lead themselves, once, right after their information reaches a buyer.
Lead auto-reply sends the lead an SMS and/or an email the moment their information is delivered to a buyer. It's the "we got your request, someone will call you" message — it closes the gap between the form they filled in and the buyer's first call.
It's off by default and entirely optional. Turn it on in Settings → Lead auto-reply (the gear in the canvas header; it's the last section of the panel), per pipeline. Switching it on reveals the two channels; switching it back off stops every send and keeps your messages for when you want them again.
Each lead is messaged once. In shared distribution a lead goes to several buyers — the auto-reply still fires once, naming the first buyer it actually reached.
Before you turn it on
| Channel | What it needs |
|---|---|
| SMS | Your own Twilio account connected, and a number you own on it. Messages are sent from your number, at your cost. |
| A verified sender domain. Lead-facing email always leaves from your domain, never from a shared LeadMove address. |
If a prerequisite is missing the switch stays greyed out, with a link to where you set it up.
Writing the message
Both channels use merge codes. Anything missing simply renders as empty — a message never shows a raw {{token}} to a lead.
| Merge code | Value |
|---|---|
{{lead.firstName}}, {{lead.lastName}} | The lead's name |
{{lead.email}}, {{lead.phone}} | Their contact details |
{{buyer.name}} | The buyer the lead was actually delivered to |
{{buyer.contactPhone}} | That buyer's contact phone — "they'll call you from…" |
{{pipeline.name}} | This pipeline's name |
{{lead.<field>}} | Any field this pipeline collects, by its name |
The default SMS is a good starting point:
Hi {{lead.firstName}}, thanks for your request! {{buyer.name}} will contact you shortly. Reply STOP to opt out.
{{buyer.contactName}} and {{buyer.contactEmail}} work too; they just don't get a button.
Click a merge code to insert it at the cursor. The preview under the box shows the message filled in with sample data, and the SMS segment count tells you when a message is about to cost two texts instead of one. Send test delivers the draft you're looking at — not the saved version — to your own phone or inbox, so you can check it before saving.
Email is plain text: line breaks are kept, and there's no HTML editor. A short, human message is the point.
Where you see it
On the lead's page, in its activity: "Auto-reply SMS sent to the lead", with the buyer it named. The exact message that went out is recorded with it, so you can still tell what a lead received months later, even if you've since rewritten the template.
Anything that stops a message is recorded the same way rather than passing silently — "Auto-reply SMS failed — Lead has no phone number", an invalid number, an opt-out, a sender domain that's no longer verified.
Phone numbers are normalized before sending. A lead who typed (415) 555-2671 is messaged fine; international numbers need their + country code to be recognised.
Excluding a buyer
Some buyers won't allow you to contact their leads at all — an exclusive buyer who wants the first call, or one who runs their own follow-up and would rather not double-text. Open the buyer, Settings → Profile, and switch Lead auto-reply to Excluded.
The setting belongs to the buyer, so it holds across every pipeline that buyer receives from — you set it once, not once per pipeline. New buyers are included by default.
An excluded buyer doesn't consume the lead's one message: in shared distribution, if a lead goes to an excluded buyer and an included one, the lead still gets exactly one auto-reply, naming the included buyer. A lead delivered only to excluded buyers is never messaged, and nothing is recorded on its timeline — that's a setting doing its job, not a failure.
Duplicating a buyer carries the exclusion over.
Manual deliveries
Assigning a lead to a buyer by hand sends the auto-reply too, exactly like an automatic delivery. The assignment form on the lead's page carries a Send the lead auto-reply switch, on by default.
Turn it off and this lead is never auto-messaged — not by this delivery, and not by any later one either. The switch appears only when the pipeline has auto-reply on and the lead hasn't been messaged yet.
Forwarding
A forwarded lead is a new lead in the target pipeline, with its own auto-reply of its own. With a copy rule, if both pipelines have auto-reply on and both deliver, the same person gets two messages — one per pipeline.
Enable auto-reply on one side of the chain, not both. There's no automatic guard, because there's no way to tell which side should speak: the source pipeline may be pure intake, or may be the brand the lead actually knows. A transfer rule can't produce a double message — the source pipeline stops distributing the lead.
What it is not
Auto-replies are not deliveries: they are never billed, never count toward a buyer's caps, and can't be disputed. They're a notification to the lead, nothing more.
Sandbox pipelines never send them, so the example pipeline can't text a real number.
Consent is yours
Messages leave from your own Twilio number and your own domain, so the compliance is yours too (TCPA in the US, GDPR in the EU). Only message leads who agreed to be contacted. STOP replies are handled by Twilio on your number: once someone opts out, Twilio refuses further messages to them, and the refusal shows up on the lead's timeline.
Common questions
Can I send the message the second the lead arrives, before a buyer has it? No — and that's deliberate. The message names the buyer who will call. Sending it before a buyer exists would promise a call nobody is going to make. A lead held for manual review, or arriving outside a buyer's operating hours, is messaged when it's actually delivered.
A lead was re-delivered or the distribution re-run. Do they get a second message? No. One message per lead, whatever happens afterwards.
Can I use a different message per buyer?
Use the {{buyer.*}} merge codes — they resolve to the buyer that actually received the lead, which covers what a per-buyer message would say. The message itself is set per pipeline. If a buyer shouldn't be messaged at all, exclude it (above) rather than writing it a message of its own.
Does duplicating a pipeline carry the auto-reply over? Yes, both channels and their templates. The copy starts paused like any duplicate, so nothing sends until you activate it.