Product Guide - Chat Playbooks

This doc outlines all of our current chat Playbook options, with detailed instructions on how to set them up and use them!

Table of Contents

1. What are Playbooks?

2. Pop-over Playbooks

   a. The Welcome Message Playbook

   b. Slider Message

   c. Full Screen Takeover

   d. Email Capture Message

   e. Account-Based Playbooks

3. Bot Playbooks

   a. The Bot Playbook

   b. Conversational Landing Pages

4. Managing Your Playbooks

What are playbooks?

Drift Playbooks: Playbooks are central to Drift and what we do! They are automated message workflows and campaigns that proactively reach out to site visitors and connect leads to your team. 

The Mission of Drift Playbooks: To qualify all site traffic, route every lead to the right rep, and make it easy for the marketer to demonstrate their success. 

If you've ever seen the personalized messages that pop up on www.drift.com when you enter the site and wondered what you were looking at, then your answer is a Playbook!

This is the Playbook homepage where you can create new and edit pre-existing Playbooks: 

The green button in the top right hand corner gives you the option to create a chat Playbook, email Playbook, or signature Playbook; however, we'll be focusing on chat Playbooks in this doc. 

You can find our pricing page here. 

Pop-over Playbooks

The Welcome Message Playbook - All Plans

This Playbook can proactively greet your site visitors and tell them whether your team is online or offline. There are two different types of welcome message available: online and offline. These Playbooks serve up a message and if a visitor responds, will open up a live chat conversation in Drift.

Often, this type of Playbook can be confused with our Default Greeting message. For clarification, you can check out the difference here. If the Playbooks are toggled off (this can be done by clicking the switch looking feature on the right side of the Playbook homepage), the message will not pop up from the chat widget, something that is true for all Playbooks. 

Slider Message - Only Paid Plans

Looking to drive traffic to a specific page on your site?

The slider message is a pop-over Playbook that serves as a useful resource when trying to direct site visitors to a specific page on your site! Like all Playbooks, the slider message will pop up on its own and can be targeted to specific users for onboarding tips, sales promotions, and everything in between. Often, it includes a CTA that has three options: start a conversation, link to a URL, and schedule a meeting. 

Full Screen Takeover - All Paid Plans 

Run a Promotion 

The full screen takeover Playbook is a great way to grab the attention of your site visitors. When users land on your site they are greeted with a full screen message that requires them to click out of before it disappears. 

This kind of messaging is used often for web stores with special offers and discounts. By using the CTA type "Link to a URL" TAs, you can direct traffic to any page on your site!

Email Capture Message - All Paid Plans

Build a Blog Subscriber List 

As the name might denote, this Playbook is a great option of you're looking to capture the email addresses of your site visitors. These look very similar to Welcome Messages, but with a specific focus on capturing email addresses!

The captured email address can be added to your CRM, which provides you with a list of contactable users who have been on your site or shown an interest in your product/service. Once you have this information, you can target these visitors with other Playbooks or marketing campaigns. 

Account-Based Playbooks

Greet Outbound Prospects You've Emailed - All Paid Plans

The Chrome Extension is free to be used by everyone; however to fully customize this type of Playbook you must be on our Pro Plan or above. 

Reps send emails to prospects all the time, BUT getting to talk to those prospects in a personalized manner? Not so often. We've changed the way conventional outbound prospecting works by enabling you to add a link to your email when sent with the Chrome Extension. Once this link has been clicked, your prospects will be greeted with a personalized message on your site.

Greet Your Targeted Accounts - Company and Enterprise Plans Only (with Clearbit add-on)

If you've spent any time as an outbound sales rep, you know that prospecting accounts can be tedious. Simply tracking the clicks on your emails can be frustrating when all you want to do is reach out to ask if they have any questions, or let them know you're available in case they need anything. 

This Playbook notifies the Account Owner when a prospect lands on your site. On top of the notification, a personalized message will be sent to the prospect from the Account Owner, which provides a tailored and customized experience.

Bot Playbooks

The Bot Playbook - Pro Plan and Up

Bot contains many functionalities to help you get the most value out of Drift

With Bot you can

• target specific types of site visitors or prospects
• qualify leads automatically
• connect leads to a human or have them book a meetings to shorten your sales cycle

This type of Playbooks gives your team the most flexibility to ask qualifying questions that your customers can respond to freely or through button responses (designed by you). Additionally, you can send automatic bot responses based on whether or not a user is qualified by your standards.

Routing rules can be used to ensure that the right people are added to the right conversations. This allows your sales team to handle inquiries and close deals, while your support team can interact with your existing customer base. 

The two overarching use cases for Bot are outlined below:

Having Sales Conversations On Your Pricing Page

Engage your visitors in a conversation during business hours. Place this Bot anywhere on your site to engage your visitors from a specific URL path. This Playbook can also send an automated message when your site visitor reaches a specific Lead Stage, which can be a good tool for setting expectations on response time, demo requests, etc. 

Booking More Qualified Meetings 

We think that the largest value you can bring to your company is having qualified leads dropped right into the laps of your sales team, rather than them trying to find the metaphoric needle in a haystack. The Bot Playbook has the ability to qualify leads and schedule meetings with no need for human interruption!

Conversational Landing Pages

To connect with your leads NOW

Take potential customers right from an ad to a bot conversation using a customized landing page that suits your brand and is completely free of distractions from the chat window! For an in depth explanation of Conversational Landing Pages, see this help article. Not only does this function as a landing page for day-to-day use, but it also one of the best tools to test and optimize your Playbooks (without having the Playbook live on your site), which allows you to build out your highest-converting campaigns.

Managing Your Playbooks 

Keeping track of your Playbooks is important! Since these are what your customers are going to see and interact with, you want to make sure they're perfect. We understand the importance, which is why we've tried to make managing your Playbooks a simple process. 

When you're on the Playbooks page, you will be able to search for specific Playbooks as well as filter through your Chat Playbooks by "Active" or "Archived". 

Edit Your Playbook

In order to edit, archive, or clone your Playbook all you need to do is click the ellipse icon on the right to choose your action.

Playbook Reports

If you click on the "Report" button next to the Playbook title, you will be brought to the Playbook report. Here you can see the breakdown of how many times the Playbook was sent, the conversations that resulted, how many times the goals were reached, and, ultimately, how many meetings were booked.  

If you click on the "People" tab, you can get more granular data and even export the data to a CSV! For more info on what kinds of reporting is available within Drift, check out this doc.