Step 1:  Connect your email sources

You have two options to get replies flowing into Drift Email - you can use one or both of these:

Connect inboxes

Connect an inbox via GSuite or Office365 - click here to get started.

Things to remember:

• The inbox should not be a personal inbox (to avoid unwanted or private conversations flowing into the product)

• The inbox needs to be a "user" account with a password. We can't connect to aliases or distribution lists.

• Pro accounts are limited to 3 inboxes. Enterprise accounts can connect up to 30. Not sure what your plan is? Contact your Customer Success Manager or reach out to Support.

 

When you connect an inbox, you will still see all your email replies show up in that inbox in Gmail or Outlook - Drift cannot block or delete any data in your connected inbox. Your emails and replies are still sent and received on your company's servers.

Once the inbox is connected, the skills you set up will determine where replies should be forwarded, and what actions in your MAP should be taken.

 

Connect a custom subdomain

Connect a subdomain - something like "reply.yourcompany.com".

Click here for a guide on connecting new or existing subdomains

 

Things to remember:

• You'll need to use the subdomain you connect to Drift Email to send your email campaigns from your MAP.

• You need to use the subdomain in both the From and Reply-To fields when you're creating email campaigns. This ensures that all your email replies go through us.

• Pro accounts are limited to 1 subdomain. Enterprise accounts can connect up to 10. Not sure what your plan is? Contact your Customer Success Manager or reach out to Support.

 

Unlike an inbox, when you use a subdomain, your email replies are received by Drift's servers.

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Step 2:  Integrate your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)

The MAP integration allows you to make automatic updates to your database from email replies that we process - such as as enriching contacts with phone numbers and job titles, cleaning up bounced or invalid addresses, managing unsubscribe requests, and creating new contacts.

Learn more and get started here

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Step 3:  Build your skills

Set up rules for how you want replies to be routed to your team, and what actions you want to take in your MAP. Start here: Common Implementation Guide

For detailed help, check out these guides:

• Update Contacts -- clean your database and append records.

• Create Mined Contacts -- sync the new referral contacts mined by Drift Email.

• Route and Track -- route human replies to your sales team or the best person to take action.

• Enrich -- sync phone numbers and job titles to contact records

• Create Sender Contacts -- create new contact for email address not currently in database

• Eloqua CDO -- sync data to Eloqua custom object