The Drift & Outreach Integration

Purpose:

The purpose of this article is to provide information and direction to Outreach Users regarding the Drift integration with Outreach.

Drive real-time conversations with your Outreach sequences! When a prospect clicks any link to your website in your Outreach sequence, they’ll be greeted with a personalized message from their sales rep. If that rep isn’t around, no problem – a bot can jump in and book a meeting for them.

There are two sides to the integration:

1. Drive Real-Time Conversations With Your Outreach Sequences
2. Automatically Follow Up With Prospects You Chat With In Drift

Below, we’ll explain how to enable the integration, how #1 works, and best practices for using the integration.

For more information on #2, visit Drift’s support documentation to see how to enroll a Drift lead into an Outreach sequence.

Intended Audience: 

• Outreach Users

Notes:

• You need the same admin on both platforms (Drift & Outreach) to enable the integration, the integration only works for users with licenses to both platforms, and adding the Drift integration is an org-wide action rather than a personal one for just one rep’s account.

Enabling the Integration

Navigate to your Org settings, look for the Drift integration, and click “Learn More” to be directed to the Drift integration installation page.

Note: If the integration has already been enabled, you can always come back to this page to manage the Drift app’s settings. Instead of seeing the “Learn More” button, you’ll instead see a button that’s labeled “Manage App”.

When you click on the “Learn More” button, you’re sharing the the details of Outreach’s side of the integration.

Click Confirm Install to install the app.

When you click install, you’ll see a box from Drift asking for access to your Outreach account. For the integration to work, Outreach needs to send some of the prospect and sender data. With this information, Drift can recognize Outreach prospects when they’re directed to Drift from an Outreach sequence link.

To ensure the same rep who sent the Outreach sequence is also the rep on the Drift chat, Drift needs to know who the Outreach user is so it can personalize the chat message for the prospect. Click “Authorize App” to give Outreach permission to send this info to Drift, and to receive the information from the conversation driven from your Outreach sequence.

You’ve successfully connected your Drift account to Outreach! There are three pieces to the next step:

1. By default, all links within your sequences will now send certain information to Drift. If Drift can find a match of the user (Sally Rep who sends the e-mail also has a Drift account she uses to chat with prospects), the Drift chatbot on your website will greet the prospect with Sally’s picture and greeting. If you choose to only have certain links on your website connect between Outreach and Drift, you can designate them in the blank box.
2. When a prospect is directed to Drift from your Outreach sequence link, if they don’t engage with the chatbot, nothing happens to your sequence. But if they send a message, a “New Conversation” will post in that prospect’s activity feed in Outreach. Each Drift chat message - from the prospect or from the rep - will then be posted as a line in your activity feed. If there is too much Drift activity clogging up your activity feed, we’d suggest unchecking “Inbound Messages” and “Outbound Messages” so each individual message doesn’t post to Outreach. A URL of the full transcript of the chat can be found on the “New Conversation” event.
3. After a prospect engages with you on your Drift chat, they will by default remain in the sequence that drove them there. To ensure that prospect’s next step is contextual, you can trigger custom actions within Outreach so they don’t continue in their current sequence unless desired. We recommend setting up a new trigger immediately to designate what should happen when one of the events stated in #2 occurs.
   

Finally, you need to turn on your Outbound Playbook in Drift. When a prospect lands on the webpage they will see the Outbound Playbook, as long as it is turned on.

You’ve now connected the integration for #1. To enable #2, you need to connect Outreach to Drift. Do so by clicking the green button “Connect Outreach to Drift.”

You can also click the green icon in your Drift settings to connect Outreach. You’re enabling Drift to see all available Outreach sequences (your private sequences and sequences that have been shared with you) and enroll leads/prospects into them directly from Drift.

Click “Authorize App" for Drift to be able to create prospects, import sequences, add to sequence, send emails from your inbox, and perform any other necessary operations within Outreach.

Now you’ve completed connecting Outreach & Drift for use cases #1 and #2.

Drive Real-Time Conversations With All Of Your Outreach Sequences

When a prospect clicks a link in your email, they’ll be redirected to the associated web page. With the Outreach + Drift integration enabled, a personalized chatbot will fire with the associated rep’s name and/or picture (assuming the Outreach rep who sent the email also uses Drift to engage with prospects).

If the prospect doesn’t engage with the chatbot, the sequence keeps moving forward unaffected.

If the prospect engages with the chatbot, their email is captured automatically, the chat activity will be posted in Outreach (based on the settings you enabled earlier), and you can determine how you want the sequence to respond (based on the triggers you set up earlier).

Drift events are posted in the Outreach activity feed

Make sure you’ve set your filters to include events from external parties. If Drift events are clogging up your activity feed, you can always update your Drift settings to limit what types of Drift events you want posted in your feed.

What’s Next?

Now that you’ve enabled the integration on both ends, what do I need to do?

Short answer: nothing! Your sequence links don’t need updating. We’ll automatically send prospect info to Drift when links are clicked and directed to your website where Drift is enabled and there is a match between the Outreach and Drift user. Drift will post chat events to the Outreach activity feed. Once the app is installed, an email notification will be sent to all Outreach admins on your account.

Long answer:

1. Now that you can put unconverted website leads into Outreach sequences, you should create sequences specifically meant to follow up with those leads. For example, if a lead goes to your pricing page, has questions about pricing but doesn’t book a meeting right then, create a “Pricing Follow-Up Sequence.”
2. Rethink your sequence strategy to not only optimize for replies, but to drive people to your website so you can have a live chat with hot, high-quality prospects.
3. If you haven’t already, set up your triggers. When a prospect is driven from your sequence to a website chat, by default, that prospect will remain in sequence. Triggers allow you to customize what happens to that prospect in Outreach after the chat finishes so the next step is contextual.

Automatically Follow Up With Prospects You Chat With In Drift

Now when you’re chatting with a prospect in Drift, you can immediately enroll them in an Outreach sequence. That way, you’ll never forget to follow up. You can learn more here, but the quick version is outlined below.

Add Contacts to an Outreach Sequence from Drift

Within your Drift contact list, you can select a Drift contact then click “Enroll in Sequence.”

You’ll then be able to view all of your own private sequences or any sequences you have permission to view and use (respecting your governance settings), and enroll the prospect into a sequence directly from Drift.

FAQs:

Q:What happens if a prospect clicks a link when I’m out of office?
A:Whatever out of office or routing rules you have in place in your Drift settings will function as always.

Q: My inbound reps use Drift & Outreach. But what happens to all the links of Outreach users who don’t use Drift?
A: Nothing different than before the integration. Your prospects will be directed to whatever link they click, and your Drift settings will function as they always have. The chat message simply won’t be personalized and you won’t be able to identify the prospect from the sequence link.

Q: How do I set up triggers of my Drift events?
A: See our support docs for triggers here.