Connect any lead source to Cadence by email

Almost every lead source you already use — Zillow Premier Agent, Realtor.com, your website contact form, most CRMs — sends you an email the moment a new lead comes in. That email is the integration. Forward it to your private Cadence address and Cadence reads it, saves the lead, and calls them back. No API keys, no plugins, no rebuilding forms.

How it works

Every Cadence account gets a private intake address that looks like this:

cadence-leads+your-account@leads.callcadence.ai

Yours is on the Channelspage of your dashboard. When a lead-notification email lands there, Cadence reads it — the lead’s name, phone number, email address, and what they asked about — creates the lead in your account, and starts the callback. The lead appears under Leads like any other, with the call recording, transcript, and outcome attached.

The reading is done by AI, not a rigid template — so it works with Zillow’s format, Realtor.com’s format, your website plugin’s format, or a colleague hitting Forward. Emails that aren’t a new-lead notification (newsletters, receipts, spam) are recognized and ignored.

Setup in three steps

• 1. Activate your inbox. On the Channels page, confirm the consent attestation (more on that below) and copy your address.
• 2. Point your lead alerts at it. Two ways:
  • Directly (easiest):add the address as an extra lead-alert recipient in your portal or form settings, wherever you’d add a teammate’s email.
  • By forwarding:in Gmail or Outlook, create a filter — “emails from zillow.com → forward to your Cadence address.” Note: Gmail requires a one-time verification of any new forwarding address, and the verification code lands in the Cadence intake rather than your inbox — email team@callcadence.aiand we’ll complete it with you.
• 3. Test it. Forward yourself a real (or mocked-up) lead email containing a name and phone number, and watch the lead appear on your Leads page.

What the email must contain

• The lead’s phone number — required. Cadence is a calling agent; an email with no phone number is logged and skipped, silently. If your source strips phone numbers from notifications (some portals do on lower tiers), have it send the full lead detail email.
• Name and email — strongly recommended. The name personalizes the opening line; the email lets Cadence send the lead a booking confirmation.
• Property or message context — recommended.Whatever the lead asked about (“the 2-bed on Santa Clara Ave”) becomes the first thing your agent references on the call.

What to expect on timing

Leads that come in by email are called during calling hours only — 8am to 9pm in the lead’s local time. A Zillow inquiry forwarded at 11pm gets its call first thing at 8am. (Leads who submit Cadence’s own hosted form, which captures instant-callback consent on the form itself, can be called back immediately at any hour — that difference is deliberate, and it’s about consent, not capability.)

The consent attestation

Before the inbox activates, you confirm one thing: the leads you forward gave their number expecting a call back about their inquiry, under consent language sufficient for AI calling. That’s your responsibility as the one who collected the lead. If your forms don’t say anything about calls yet, the Channels page has ready-made consent language to paste next to your submit button, and our TCPA guide covers the rules in plain English.

Technical notes (for integrators and developers)

• Address routing: the org identifier rides in the plus-suffix. The address must appear in the To, Delivered-To, or X-Forwarded-To header — standard auto-forwarding preserves this.
• Format: plain text or HTML, one lead per email. Bodies are read up to ~50,000 characters; anything structured or unstructured works — the parser is an LLM with a strict extraction schema, not a regex per portal.
• Extraction schema:lead name, phone (normalized to E.164, US default), email, stated interest/message, and source (e.g. “Zillow”). The parser is instructed to never lift the agent’s or brokerage’s own contact details from signatures and footers.
• Deduplication:a lead matching an existing lead’s phone or email within 30 days attaches to the existing record instead of starting a new call cadence.
• Opt-outs:an email whose subject or opening line is a STOP-style request (“stop”, “unsubscribe”, “remove me”, “opt out”) is processed as an opt-out: the matching lead is marked, pending calls are canceled, and the number goes on your do-not-call list.
• Account state: the inbox only accepts leads while the account is live and the consent attestation is on file.

Questions a setup guide can’t answer? Email team@callcadence.ai — a person reads it.