Email bots are like your best SDR - automated assistants that nurture your leads from chat, determine interest, and pass only the hot leads on to your sales reps. You can build out your bot emails with chat data from Drift Intel and when you get a reply your bot will interpret the response.  If there is positive intent, the bot automatically cc's the right sales owner into the conversation.

The information contained in this article has been marked as outdated as of 9/15/2020 by CSM Katja Ritche. Details within this article may no longer be relevant to your usage.

 

Building your Campaign and Skills 

To create a new campaign, select the envelope icon from the left side bar (second from the top).

On the audience tab, you will see options to include and exclude lists from your MAP.  You will see a preview of how many people will receive the email. This is an approximation if you use multiple lists with duplicate entries. Please note: you can use a static or smart list.

 

The Emails tab is where you will build your sequence of emails. By default, the campaign will include 4 emails with a series of set delays.  This is simply a suggestion - there really is no limit to the number of emails you can have in a campaign. 

Click into the first email to customize it with photos, emojis and personalization tokens.

 

You can change the delay between between Emails by clicking the number above the email subject.  

 

You can scroll down to add a second Email to your campaign.

On the sender tab, choose what Email address and name you'd like the Emails to come from.  Only Emails connected as Bot inboxes will appear here.  

To test an individual Email in your campaign, click on the specific Email and select Send Test Email.  This will be sent to the Email you're logged in with.  Currently, there isn't a way to send a test to a different Email address.

 

Alternatively, if you'd like to test an entire series of Emails, select Send Test Campaign on the top right hand part of the screen.  You don't need to turn your campaign on to test, but you will need to publish your changes to have the most recent version of your Emails reflected in your test.

Testing Note:

When testing your Email Bot, your Emails will appear in the your inbox instantly without the delays you have set up.

 

What happens if someone replies to my email?
When a lead applies to your email, they will automatically be removed from the email sequence and not receive any further emails.

Building Bot Actions

Your bot actions live on the right side of your campaign builder.  You’ll notice that yes, no, and other have pre-built responses you can use.  You can also edit these or add custom additional responses.

To edit a reply, click into the box.

You can customize the text and add links and emojis here. 

 

If you want the bot to send a reply immediately on your behalf, chose send a reply.  Click the drop down to draft a reply, which will create a draft in your inbox that you can edit and approve before sending. 

Tip: we usually recommend sending a reply for yes/no responses, and creating a draft for other so you can customize it before sending.

To CC a specific rep on the bot reply, you can have a static individual per reply (maybe this campaign is only worked by one SDR), you can use lead owner lookup to cross reference your MAP and CC them into the conversation, or you can round robin a group of people to evenly distribute replies. If using the lead owner lookup, it is a good idea to have a fallback email in case we cannot find the lead owner in Marketo.

Tracking tab - for each bot reply type, you can customize the actions that will update your MAP (in this example Marketo). 

You can add the contacts to a specific list based on their response and/or update a specific field based on their response.  We recommend having a custom list based on each response.

Ready to send it? Click the toggle in the top right to turn both bot replies and email sending on.  Note: to test the bot replies, turn bot replies on while leaving email sending off.  When email sending is turned on, all contacts in the list will be enrolled.

Replies in the Inbox

If reply is ___send a response:

 

When you choose to send a response automatically this is how it appears in your inbox.  The response will say scheduled before it's sent then completed once it's been sent successfully.

If reply is ___ send a draft:

 

When you choose to draft a response (rather than send a reply), this is how it looks in your inbox.  The emails will be tagged “needs review” and you can edit the text and click approve tasks to send.

Before you go live, ensure the following:

1. That you have turned on both email sending and bot replies.
2. That your integration is connected under Settings > Integrations. 
3. That your Bot Account has a connected Email.
4. That you have suppressed any contacts in your MAP that you don't wish to enroll in your campaign.

Need more help?  Chat in with our support team or email support@siftrock.com.