Bot Skill: Email Capture

Drift builds contact details for each site visitor, so that you can identify and qualify leads, follow up using Drift Email Sequences, or send contact information into your other connected accounts, like Salesforce or Marketo! One of the most common and effective ways of identifying visitors and contacting them are by capturing their email address.

In this doc, we'll cover

• adding an email capture bot skill within a Playbook
• configuring the skill's setup
• customizing the outputs

Bot Playbooks and skills are available on our Eseential plan and above.

Adding an Email Capture

Capturing an email address is the bare minimum amount of information Drift needs to store a site visitor as an identified contact. There are three ways to capture an email!

All forms of captured email are enriched with ClearBit. For more information on our ClearBit Integration and how it works with your plan, check out this help doc!

Head to any of your existing Playbooks or create a new one from the Marketplace. Once you're in the visual builder, click the + icon, Add skill, and then Email Capture.

You'll see the following node dropped into your builder:

You'll see three output nodes as well: Valid email, Invalid email, and Unwanted email.

Configuring the Skill

If you click the Email Capture node, you'll be brought into a modal that will allow you to customize how the skill will function. You can

• edit and format the text that will be presented to the visitor
• select how many times to ask for an email
• filter out spam domains as well as non-business emails (ex. Gmail addresses)

Once you've configured the setup, click Save and close. Next, click any of the outputs. You'll be brought into an Outputs modal where you can configure the text the bot serves in response to a a visitors' input, as well as apply contact attributes, lead stages, CQL score, etc.

When you're finished, click Save and close. You may want to take those different outputs down separate paths - you can do that, too! Click the + icon next to the Outputs node to configure how you'd like your flow to proceed. 

For more information on building different paths, head to the "Building a New Path" section of this doc.

A Quick Note on Testing Your Playbooks

If you are testing a Playbook and an email capture doesn't seem to fire for you or gets skipped, it's more than likely because the bot knows who you are, through the use of cookies! Make sure you're testing in a new incognito window with every test or clear your cookies if you'd like to see the skill in action.

You can also look for this behavior within the conversation view. You'll see "Question skipped - email already known" appear as an event within the conversation!

Still stuck? Email us at support@drift.com. Not using Drift yet? Get your free account here.