Enquiries, and the three things you can do with one

An enquiry is a record of somebody asking to sponsor your newsletter, and it arrives in two places: the Enquiries page inside Issue Mint, and your email inbox, one message per enquiry. The most recent hundred are listed newest first, and the ones still waiting on you are counted on a badge beside the Enquiries button.

Replies happen in your own email. Issue Mint keeps the record and the inventory, and never writes to a sponsor on your behalf.

What arrives

An enquiry carries the sponsor’s name, their email address, their company if they gave one, whatever they wrote in the message box, and the dates they ticked.

Each date is listed with its slot type, its price and its current status, so the enquiry is readable on its own without cross-referencing the grid. Enquiries sent through enquiry mode have no dates attached and say so. The email version carries the same detail, and it goes out one per enquiry rather than in a daily digest, because a sponsor who has to wait a day for an acknowledgement often has a different plan by then.

The hold on the dates they asked for

Ticked dates go on hold the moment the enquiry is submitted, and stay held for 7 days.

A held date reads “on hold” on your public page rather than “sold”, and cannot be ticked by anybody else. That is what stops you selling the same slot twice while you are writing back. The check happens at the moment of submission rather than from the page the sponsor is looking at, so two sponsors submitting for the same date within seconds of each other cannot both get it: the first one gets the date, and the second is told the date went and asked to mention which they wanted in their reply.

The hold lifts on its own

Issue Mint releases lapsed holds once a day. A date whose hold has run out goes back on sale automatically, with the sponsor’s details cleared off it.

Nothing is lost when that happens. The enquiry stays in your inbox, still open and still confirmable. What the release protects is your inventory: a hold that never expired would let one enquiry you never got round to answering keep your best dates off sale for a month.

Reply

The Reply button opens a message to the sponsor in your own email client and marks the enquiry as replied, which takes it off the waiting count without forcing a decision.

Use it for the conversation an enquiry usually needs before anybody commits. Issue Mint sends nothing itself, keeps no thread, and does not read the reply, so the record of what was agreed lives in your mailbox where the rest of your sponsor correspondence already is.

Confirm

Confirming books every date on the enquiry to that sponsor, and asks for two things first: the name that should appear on the placement, and where it should link.

The name is prefilled with the company where one was given, because the name a reader should see is usually the company rather than the person who happened to send the email. The link is optional and can be added later in the composer. Once confirmed, the dates read as sold on your public page and the booking waits in the issue going out that day. A date whose hold had already lapsed is bookable again here, because you deciding is what matters rather than the clock.

Decline

Declining puts the dates back on sale and marks the enquiry closed.

Only dates still held for that enquiry are released. A date you have since sold to somebody else stays sold, so declining the enquiry that lost out cannot undo the booking that won. As with confirming, nothing is sent to the sponsor. If they should hear about it, that is a reply you write.

What the statuses mean

An enquiry is new until you touch it, replied once you have written back, and then either confirmed or declined.

New and replied are the two that count as open, which is what drives the badge and the count at the top of the page. Confirmed and declined are final: an enquiry cannot be confirmed twice, so the buttons go once a decision is recorded. The slot statuses run alongside on their own three: available, reserved and booked, which are listed with the rest of them. Selling sponsorship this way is the part of Issue Mint’s sponsorship tools that replaces the spreadsheet rather than the inbox.