Email Capture Skill

Overview

The email capture skill looks like a free response question from the site visitor's perspective, but includes backend data validation to ensure you gather good quality information. Use the email capture skill any time you ask visitors for their email address, even if you aren't restricting email quality (requiring a business email, filtering out known spam or blocked domains) to ensure the field maps properly to CRM.

The Basics:

Need help getting started? Check out these great resources:

Adding email capture

  1. Insert an email capture skill into the builder
  1. Edit the skill to customize the message text and select the email types you want to exclude
  1. Optional: customize the number of attempts the bot should take to get a valid email and the message text for each additional attempt
  1. Save and close

Skill Outcomes

The two exits from an email capture skill are the following:

  • Failed to capture email
  • Successfully captured email

Remember that both of these exits must connect to another skill in the bot-builder to prevent errors in the chatbot.

Best practices

  1. In your message text, explain why you're asking for their email. People are more willing to provide this information if they understand what it will be used for.

Try:

  • What's a good email to send the calendar invite to?
  • What's a good email in case we get disconnected?
  1. Limit the number of attempts to get their email. The default setting is to ask three times, but often asking twice creates a less frustrating user experience.
  2. Use friendly and transparent messaging. Remember, site visitors don't know what comes next in your automated bot flow. They'll provide more information if they're comfortable in the conversation.

Spam, blocked domains, and personal emails

Update the lists of unwanted domains for each of these categories in your Email Capture Settings.

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