Product Guide - Email Playbooks

Drift Email Playbooks are the best way to turn your emails into engaging conversations that close leads faster. This doc is the ultimate resource for touring you around the product and walking you through the features. 

In this doc, we'll go over

• where to find Email Playbooks
• setting up Marketing Drip Campaigns and Triggered Emails
• composing Sales Sequences with Gmail

Start in the Playbook Marketplace

To create an email Playbook, click the Playbooks icon on the left-hand navigation bar. Click Create new Playbook to be brought to the Playbook Marketplace, where you can select a Playbook type.

From here, you will see the Marketplace where you can scroll or click on a Playbook type. Navigate to Email and you'll see three Playbook options. Each of the types have a brief description underneath detailing what they can generally be used for. 

• Triggered email - great for automatically sending an email when a user takes a specific action or meets a specific criteria
• Drip Campaign - a series of emails to help you nurture your prospects
• Sales Sequence  - emails that send from an individual rep's Gmail to engage leads

We strongly recommend setting up DKIM so that your emails send from your domain. For the guide on how to set that up, click here!

Triggered Emails and Marketing Drip Campaigns

When you create a new Marketing Drip or Triggered Email, you'll be brought to the page to compose your emails initially. 

Compose your Emails

First, you'll want to consider the template for your email. You can choose from a simple text template, logo styled with your company logo (from this page), or banner-styled where you can insert a custom banner image.

Next up is editing the email Sender and Subject. For Sender, the default is the email address for your account, but you have a few options!. Hover over the Sender line and click the "edit" button.

Clicking brings up this window, where you can choose to send from any Drift User.

Or, you can choose to dynamically send from the account owner in Drift by clicking the dropdown next to "Drift User." You can customize the format of the send from line and choose a default value if there's no account owner for this company in Drift.

Now it's time to edit the copy! Along with the standard text editor options, you also have the ability to insert your Drift calendar link, add personalization tokens, dynamically add the sender's email signature, and input custom buttons.

You can also choose to delay the first email send by a number of days. 

To add another email to this campaign, click "Add email" and you'll be able to set the delay for that, as well.

Preview

The preview tab lets you see how your email will actually look. You can preview the Template, click the Default button to see default values in place of any personalization tokens, and click the Contact button to fill personalization tokens with information from a particular contact segment.

Advanced Sending Options

Our advanced options give you full control over when and how your emails send, with options to include weekends and holidays, unenroll if someone replies, or send based on when someone is most likely to open an email!

Audience

This is where you set and manage the recipients of your email(s). 

Audience - Segment

In this window, you choose which segments to include and which to exclude from receiving the email(s). Click the check mark or 'X' mark next to a segment name to include or exclude it, respectively. 

If you click over to the "Smart Filter" tab, you'll be able to add more settings that work in conjunction with your audience inclusion and exclusion. 

You can dynamically exclude any contacts that are engaged with your sales team or ones that had a recent conversation on your site from receiving or continuing to receive emails in this playbook, depending on when they become engaged. Additionally, you can have the setting for "Abandoned Scheduling" on, which would just follow up with anybody who doesn't complete the meeting booking flow after hitting a calendar drop. You can learn more about that here.

Review

Sending your Email

Last but not least, toggle your playbook on and send it out! This page will let you know how many people will receive this email, and it will also remind you to set up your DKIM as well as making sure the sender of the email connects their Gmail account so that we can properly track replies. 

Sales Email Sequence with Gmail

The email builder will look fairly similar to the other Playbook types, but with a few key differences. 

You won't be able to change the sender of these emails as they are a personalized sequence set from a rep.

Advanced Options

These are the same advanced options as with our other email Playbooks, but we automatically enable the first three to help you maximize your sequence's effectiveness!

Audience Exclusions

Your Audience selection will be based on who you'd like to exclude. This is because sales sequences are manually enrolled per contact. Members of the segments you include in this list will be excluded from this sales sequence.

Reviewing and Enabling your Sequence 

On this screen, you'll see some tasks if you haven't completed them. 

• Connecting your Gmail account
• Installing our Chrome extension (for info on the extension, check out our help doc here).
• Enabling this sequence (it will not auto send and you can not add contacts to this sequence until this is done)
• Links to enroll from Drift, Salesforce, or directly through Gmail.

Once all that is set up, you're ready to go! You can start enrolling leads into your sales sequence! For more information on how to do that, check out this doc!

Signatures

You can use your Drift email signature for all of these options to help you add a personal touch, a link to your profile, or a CTA. For more on signatures and how to utilize them, check out this doc!