NOTE: This feature is available for Drift Email Bot customers only.

Having a robust and engaged audience list is an essential part of making your Email Bot campaign successful.

Campaign strategy

The main consideration when building your target audience is your overall campaign strategy.

• What is the purpose of your campaign?
• Is this a one-time campaign or an ongoing nurture?
• How will you maintain compliance with unsubscribes/opt-out?
• What is the CTA of each email in your campaign? (Remember this should be structured to prompt a yes/no/other response)

The specific prospect criteria that you build your list upon will be particular to your marketing operations and database setup.

Campaign exclusivity

The first decision to make about your email bot campaign audience is how it should interact with your other email bot campaigns. We recommend the "Yes" option for any campaign mimicking a salesperson's outreach or doing general nurture so that a prospect can only be in 1 of these at a time. There are some situations where "No" is appropriate, e.g. for more transactional event invite/follow up emails.

Below is a handy grid for figuring out how your choice will interact with your other campaigns:

Could a recipient be in 2 campaigns at once?		Second Campaign Setting
		Yes	No
First Campaign Setting	Yes	No (will keep receiving first campaign only)	Yes (will receive both)
	No	Yes (will receive both)	Yes (will receive both)

Supported audience sources

• You can import your audience to Drift Email via your marketing platform integration (Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, Eloqua), or using a CSV upload. 

Static and dynamic lists

Drift Email Bot campaigns support both static and dynamic (“smart”) lists from supported integrations.

Since Email Bot campaigns are typically multi-email sequences, we recommend leveraging dynamic lists to ensure that your audience remains as targeted as possible even as the campaign progresses.

Before each send in the sequence, we check back against your audience list and are therefore able to accommodate any changes in campaign enrollments.

Suppression criteria

We recommend suppressing the following categories of prospects for most Email Bot campaigns:

• Current customers and/or partners
• Prospects who are actively being contacted by your Sales team and/or part of open opportunities
• Prospects who have been disqualified from your sales process
• Prospects who have unsubscribed from marketing communications

To exclude these groups from your email sends, import them as additional lists and add the lists to the "Who should be excluded from this campaign?" section of the email campaign audience tab. 

 

There will always be additional suppression criteria specific to your company and goals.

It is worth paying attention to and planning out the number of campaigns running simultaneously to prevent accidentally bombarding your prospects with too much communication. When running simultaneous campaigns, consider differences in tone, topic, and value propositions to ensure your sequences deliver a helpful and cohesive message to your audience.