Get Started: 3 Must-Have Skills

What we'll cover:

This guide goes through the three main use cases for Drift Email. Start here as a foundation, and then get creative:

1. Opting out invalid contacts
2. Routing human replies to your team
3. Creating new contacts

Before you start: Set-up in Your MAP

Static lists:

• Drift Email new contacts - This will be used in a Create Mined Contacts skill

• Drift Email invalid contacts - This will be used in an Update Contacts skill

Custom fields:

• Drift Email Reply Date - used for measuring/tracking replies over time.

• Drift Email Reply Text - used for storing actual replies with contacts in your MAP, can be useful for human replies.

• Drift Email Subject Line - for associating a contact with a certain campaign in your MAP

You'll also probably want to map data from Drift Email to existing fields in your MAP. Here are the fields most customers work with:

• Lead Source - When creating a new contact

• Email Invalid - When updating invalid contacts

• Email Invalid Cause - When updating invalid contacts

• Exclude/Suspend/Opt Out - When updating invalid contacts, many customers will use an existing suspend, unsubscribe, or exclusion type field.

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Use Case 1: Update Invalid Contacts 

(See more detailed help here)

Why? Cleaner database = better results.

Navigate to the Skills page. Click "Create New Skill" and select "Update Contacts."

In the Filters tab of your new skill, set the Reply Types to Bounce, Left Company, System, and Unsubscribe.

In this example, we're creating the skill to opt-out all of these reply types in the same way. If you want to treat these types differently (for example, if you want a Left Company reply to be tracked differently in your MAP than an Unsubscribe), you should create separate skills for each use case.

2. In the Update tab, select a static list (if you've created one) to push these contacts to a list.

On this step, you should also map any fields you're using to mark these contacts as opted out.

Some examples of common field updates:

• Drift Email Field "Drift Email Reply Type" mapped to custom MAP Field "Drift Email Reply Type"

• Static Field "Email Invalid" set to value "True"

• Static Field "Email Invalid Cause" set to value "Drift Email"

Save and Enable your skill in the upper right.

Your skill is now set up to handle these scenarios:

• Ken has Left his Company. Update his contact record so you can exclude from future campaigns.

• Len's email is invalid and returned a Bounce. Update his contact record to exclude from future campaigns.

• Sven replied to asking to be Unsubscribed. He ignored the link in your footer and instead replied. Update his contact record to exclude from future campaigns.

Use Case 2: Managing Human Emails

(see more detailed help here)

Why? When people reply to emails, engaging quickly creates a positive experience.

Navigate back to the Skills page and click Create New Skill. This time, select Route to teammates.

1. In the Filters tab, select the Human Reply type.

You might decide that replies to different marketing addresses should be routed to different people. (For instance, replies to sales@yourcompany.com should be routed to a sales rep, but replies to customers@yourcompany.com should be sent to your Support team.)

If this is the case, set the Source filter to include or exclude certain email addresses.

You may also decide that only certain replies should be routed. For example, you may only want to send replies to Sales if they include words like "demo", "pricing", "call", "meeting", etc.

If this is the case, set the Body Text filter to include or exclude key phrases of your choosing.

If you leave all the filters blank, this means that any Human Reply to any marketing email address connected to Drift will be routed through your skill.

2. Select the Routing tab to decide how your replies should be forwarded to your team.

You have a few options:

• A specific teammate - enter one or more email addresses of your choosing. These do not have to be users on your Drift Email account; it can be anyone at your company.
• A dynamic alias - this option is only for customers using subdomains. More on dynamic routing here.
• MAP Lead Owner - this option is available to Enterprise customers only. This will perform a lookup to an owner field in your MAP and pull in the corresponding rep.
  • Don't see this option? Contact support@drift.com (or your Account Executive or CSM) to learn more.
  • Already have this option? More on using Lead Owner Routing here.

3. Navigate to the Update tab.

When tracking Human Replies, we recommend using fields to map Drift Email data to your MAP. 

Recommendations:

• Drift Email Field "Date of the reply" mapped to custom MAP field "Drift Email Reply Date"

• Drift Email Field "Email subject" mapped to custom MAP field "Drift Email Subject"

• Drift Email Field "Text of the reply" mapped to custom MAP field or existing Notes field

This will enable you to track when a contact last replied to a marketing campaign, which email they replied to, and what they said.

If you'd like, you can also put these contacts on a static list. 

Your skill is now set up to handle these scenarios:

• Jen replies to one of your marketing campaigns. You can measure this reply as a signal of engagement.

• Jen's sales rep gets her reply forwarded straight to their inbox, and can respond quickly.

• You focus on measuring true human responses, rather than counting an auto-reply as an engagement.

• You can review the content of what people say in response to your marketing email, and use this info to optimize your future campaigns.

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Use Case 3:  Add New Contacts 

(see more detailed help here)

Why? More contacts = more conversations.

Click Create New Skill and select Create mined contacts.

1. In the Filters tab, set the Reply Types to Out of Office, Vacation, and Left Company.

You'll see a new filter for Contact quality, with the options High, Medium, and Low. Quality is assigned based on how much information Drift can find about the new contact within the email reply.

We recommend using High quality, and if you'd like, you can add Medium quality. More on contact quality here.

2. In the Update tab, we recommend adding your new contacts to a static list for easy tracking.

We also recommend marking a Source field in your MAP to attribute these contacts to Drift Email.

Field mappings with all the basic information we can pull for new contacts are already set up in the Map Drift Email fields section.

There is also a section to Map sender fields. In this case, the "Sender" is the person who sent the Out of Office or Left Company reply.

This allows you to copy information from your existing contact (the one who went on vacation or left their company) over to your new mined contact.

Recommendations for sender field mappings are State, Country, Postal Code, Company Name - anything that your database might require in order to properly add a new contact.

Your skill is now set up to handle these scenarios:

• Jen is out of the office and referred you to Sven while she's out. Create a new contact record for Sven in your database with the same company & account info.

• Glen has left his company and been replaced by Ben. Create a new contact record for Ben with the same company & account info.