What is Drip?
Drip was founded in 2013 and after that, it began to evolve from an email opt-in widget to a platform. Of marketing automation Complete for e-commerce businesses.
Later, Drip was acquired by a lead generation software company, 'Leadpages'.
DRIP's main objective is to provide B2B automation to B2C businesses. So we can say that Drip is an ECRM (e-Commerce Customer Relationship Manager). Drip's increasing growth is as follows:
- 68 employees
- 4.7k customers
- Emails sent: 1.8 billion
- Customer events monitored: 3.2 billion
Drip is one of the best marketing automation solutions because it has a lot of amazing features. I only have 100 subscribers and yet I can use it for free.
Its starter plan is free and comes with lots of great features. You can also try out the starter plan for trial purposes and get the full knowledge from the Drip team.
Here, I am sharing with you a few Drip features that are being promoted by the Drip team for customers.
The characteristics of the Starter Plan are as follows:
- Unlimited users
- Lead scoring
- Purchase notifications
- Unlimited email delivery
- Access to the API (Application Programming Interface)
- Third-party integration
- Email opt-in widgets
I've seen four plans, including the free starter plan. The other three plans were the Enterprise, Basic, and Pro plans.
The best part that I found among all of these plans is that all the plans have the same characteristics. The only difference between Basic, Enterprise, and Pro plans is the number of subscribers.
Customers can also remove Drip branding from opt-in widgets, which is one of Drip's cool features.
Features
Drip's focus on e-commerce marketing led him to create a very good email editor, decent subscriber management features, and a solid set of automation workflows. Plus, you know, tight e-commerce integration.
Unfortunately, there are virtually no templates to choose from, and there's no landing page creator either.
That's the problem: Drip is a very focused platform, with a slightly tinkered philosophy. This is fine for some people, but may be a hindrance for others.
Email campaigns, templates, and personalization
Drip's email campaign publishing options are simple but effective. You can send an explosion with a single email, create a series of emails to send over time, or you can create a campaign that follows a specific automation flow (more on that below).
You can also send your campaigns by SMS, as long as you have theOne of paid plans. Publishing your latest social media via the newsletter would probably be easier via third-party integrations like Zapier.
There are two types of email templates: plain text and sophisticated visual templates. And, well, fancy visual models are good. They are modern, attractive, and I would be tempted to look at them based on their beauty.
Unfortunately, I was only able to find 7 templates, and the others were just basic frameworks to help you start creating your own models.
I have nothing against the focus being on DIY, but I might need a larger selection of starter templates. Don't forget that AWeber has over 700 email templates.
Luckily, the template editor makes up for (a bit) the template problem by being one of the best template editors I've come across. You can create fairly complex layouts (for emails), and add the usual images, text, buttons, and social links.
You can also customize the overall design of the email, including default font styles and sizes, colors, button styles, and overall layout width. Any templates you create will be mobile-friendly and you can preview/edit the mobile version of the template as you create it.
There is also a fairly decent choice of fonts for an email editor. I saw competitors whose list was much smaller. Additionally, the editor seems to support, at least partially, right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. In any case, it worked when I copied and pasted Hebrew characters into...
You can personalize your emails for your customers in a number of ways. First, you can use variables to enter each subscriber's name, email address, address, location, custom field values, etc. Then, you can add information such as your business address, email campaign title, (essential) unsubscribe links, (essential) unsubscribe links, “Show in browser” URLs, and a number of other options.
Second, you can create custom content snippets that can be used in multiple emails to quickly complete content that needs to be repeated. Love this feature every time I see it.
Once you've created a template and a campaign, you can choose to A/B test (or split test) your email before sending it out. A/B testing involves sending two or more versions of a message to different people to see who gets the best results from your subscribers.
You can test everything from an email layout to slightly different text to simple color changes. This can help you find the best way to engage with your readers.
Drip allows you to test both the subject line and the content of an email. That's a good thing, as many services only allow you to test subject lines. And since I need more than that for my split testing, I was eager to find that Drip was up to the task.
Overall, my email design experience with Drip was simple and easy, and I almost enjoyed it.
The lack of starting templates is a big blow, but if you like creating your own designs, Drip isn't a bad option.
Mailing lists and segmentation
You can add people to your address lists one at a time, copy and paste a bunch of addresses, import them from a CSV file, or import them directly from Mailchimp If you have an account there.
Note that you Can't import contacts from another format, such as text or Excel files.
Here is something that I like. Not only can you associate all the columns in your CSV files to specific fields, but you can also add tags and perform other automation actions during the import. I will come back to automation a little later.
You can add or find all sorts of information about each subscriber's profile, including their name, address, phone number, and how their address was added to the system. You can even see if they have given you their consent to use their data in accordance with European regulations.
However, you need to obtain this type of information via a registration form, for example. Then, you can add tags, as well as custom fields for additional ways to sort subscribers.
Speaking of sorting your subscribers, you can easily use the main menu to see which of your subscribers are active, which are inactive, and sort them out by tags or fields.
Additional sorting is possible thanks to the filters located at the top of the “People” page. You can then sequence the filters to obtain, for example, a list of people in Belgium who opened your last email and who have a value defined in the custom field “ice_cream”.
Once you've linked these filters together, you can save them as “segments.” Segments are lists of subscribers that are dynamically filled in and meet certain criteria. If you save the filter chain above as a segment, for example, you'll still be able to see which of your subscribers like your emails, live in Belgium, and want ice cream.
That would, I presume, be all subscribers in Belgium. I mean, who doesn't like ice cream?
Segmentation is very important to help you send the right emails to the right subscribers. It's also useful for automation, which I'll discuss later.
It's also important to keep your subscriber list healthy. You don't want to keep people who don't interact with your emails on your list because they count against your subscriber limit and because people who no longer want your emails may be inclined to file complaints.
Fortunately, Drip makes it easy to identify inactive or disengaged contacts and unsubscribe or remove them from your system through bulk actions (which are quite versatile).
But now we come to the suppression lists. It's what you need when you absolutely, positively, want to make sure you never send an email to a particular contact again. They're generally used to comply with spam laws in some countries, but you can also do it if you don't like this person.
There's no “delete list” in Drip, but you Can “deactivate” contacts individually or in bulk, which is much the same.
Overall, DRIP's contact management and sorting systems are streamlined and well done. I agree.
Landing pages
Honestly, most major email marketing services include this feature for a very specific reason. People need easy ways to advertise their newsletters, and landing pages can help. I'm sorry to say Drip doesn't offer any of that.
If you want an email solution that has this feature, check out ActiveCampaign. It's not for nothing that it's at the top of our list of the best email marketing services.
Automation
Automation is one of those awesome tools that make email marketing Plenty Less tedious than it would otherwise be. In fact, it allows you to set up fully pre-programmed email processes and campaigns, which means you can let those campaigns run by themselves.
Drip calls their automation system “Workflows” and it's very useful. Let's say someone signs up for your learning course via email. An automated workflow can send her a welcome email immediately and then send her the next course email once a week, every week, until everything is complete. And you don't have to do much more than create the first few emails.
Another workflow might be sending reminder emails to people who abandoned their shopping carts in your online store. You can also send emails about your kitchen appliance offers to subscribers who buy an ice cream maker in your store.
Honestly, it's in Drip's automation system that the focus on e-commerce really comes in. You can use your store to help you manage and sort your subscribers, to tell you who is most interested in what you sell, and to learn what products they like. But hey... Plenty Other e-commerce platforms can too.
To help you get started, Drip offers nearly 30 automation models for you to choose from. These include everything from automatically unsubscribing contacts whose emails aren't working, to abandoned cart emails for multiple stores, to welcome emails for first-time purchases.
Like all the best automation editors for email marketing, DRIP's automation and workflow editor looks like mind mapping software. This makes it much easier to visualize the process that users will go through when each particular workflow is triggered.
I was very happy with DRIP's automation feature. It's no better than the competition, but it's certainly not worse either.
Analysis and reports
Analyses are no easy task. After all, you need to know how your customers interact with your emails, and what types of emails best sell your product or business. Data is the lifeblood of any modern marketing effort, so you need a lot of it.
And Drip provides a fairly large amount of data, with an emphasis on integrating with your online store to track purchases. The idea, of course, is to help you develop email campaigns that focus on your store's products.
For starters, there's an easy overview of how everything is going:
You can see how much revenue is generated from sales on your integrated store. You can also, of course, see how many people are opening your emails and clicking on the links. You can see which links are performing best and track hourly engagement trends.
You can even use Drip to track some of the analytics on your website. And if you really want to get your hands dirty, you can track the automated workflows that are being carried out, the number of labels that are automatically added to profiles, the number of people who are labeled as “prospects”, the number of orders completed or abandoned, and much more.
Of course, you can also access individual campaigns to see how they are performing. In fact, this is best most of the time, as some of the more general reports may take longer to generate and update their data.
These are in fact some of the most detailed analyses I've seen at this price level, especially at AWeber And Benchmark, and I am very happy with it. Store-based analytics are a bit more advanced than what I've seen on most other email platforms.
Integrations
Drip has a good number of integrations., all major CRMs and webinar platforms are included.
The above is the integration of their e-commerce platform. Considering that Drip is relatively a newcomer to the game, they are developing rapidly.
They also have a Zapier integration. The number of triggers and actions is simply breathtaking.
Drip also has an integration with Integromat, with a much larger number of actions, searches, at a much more affordable price and more features than Zapier.
They also have a section dedicated to webhooks.
This webhook feature is really very comprehensive. You can see that there are a number of trigger actions that the screenshot above simply cannot contain.
With a bit of knowledge, you can easily integrate Drip with just about any other application that supports webhooks without Zapier.
Additional features
Drip's extras include things like the form builder. You can create newsletter signup forms for your campaigns and workflows and then integrate them into your website.
But the main additional feature is the third-party integration system. Clearly, a lot of effort has gone into integrating e-commerce platforms, as that's Drip's main selling point — it integrates with stores. It is specially designed to integrate with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce And woocommerce, as well as to a number of others.
But beyond that, you can connect to over 100 services in total, including non-commercial options like Facebook, Zapier, PayPal, Gravity Forms, etc. And that's not counting the number of services that can be integrated using Zapier.
Overall, Drip has a solid feature set, but some of these missing parts — like the templates and the landing page creator — detract from the overall experience. Not to mention the lack of support for Excel files. Nonetheless, Drip does a lot of things well.
How does Drip work?
The principle of operation of the Drip is quite simple.
If you want to partner with Drip, all you need to do is follow a few simple steps. I tried this site and observed that initially we need to learn a few things and that will help us get the desired result.
The interface is quite convenient and user-friendly. There are a few free trial packs for you so you can get some brief knowledge on this site. So you can try a free trial pack and contact customer service with any questions.
First, you need to register with a new account on the site, and then you will be asked to make a choice of plan. There are three plans available to us like a Basic Plan, a Pro Plan, and an Enterprise Plan.
The price of each plan is different, so you should choose the plan based on the number of subscribers. Then, make the payment for your respective plan with your debit card. You will then be able to take advantage of your company's functionalities.
Customer Support
I prefer Drip because of their great customer service, who can provide support via chat and email. The best part is that it also provides knowledge-based articles that have helped a lot of people. All paid plans include live chat support for all customers.
This service can be used during regular business days (Monday to Friday). Email support is available for all plans, but the free plan only has 30 days of email service.
There are other support services, such as a video course that contains comprehensive information to start using the Drip system. I am personally very impressed with his customer service as he helped me a lot with Drip services.
Pricing
Drip offers you 3 plans that have different characteristics depending on their prices. All of their plans are remarkable but I would recommend that you go for the Pro Plan. It has all the features needed for e-commerce CRM. Also, the plan only costs $99/month, which is worth buying. Take a look at all of the plans Drip has to offer.
- The first is a basic plan that costs $41 per month when the customer pays annually. Otherwise, it costs around $49 per month when the customer pays monthly.
- The second plan is a Pro plan that costs you $99 per month.
- The third and final plan is the Enterprise plan. In this plan, you will have an “online Drip calculator” to find out the amount of your monthly payment.
In addition, the first two months of the Basic and Pro packs are free when the customer chooses to pay annually. The features of all plans are the same, with the only difference being the number of subscribers.
The basic plan can accommodate 2.5 000 subscribers, while the Pro plan is preferred by businesses with between 2.5 000 and 5 000 subscribers. If you have more than 5,000 subscribers, you can opt for the Enterprise plan.
FAQs
What is Drip?
Drip is an email marketing and automation platform owned by the guys behind Leadpages. It is designed to be a CRM for e-commerce businesses.
Who is Drip Best for?
Drip is more suited to e-commerce business owners and marketers who need advanced automation.
Is Drip better than ActiveCampaign?
When it comes to the user interface and UX ActiveCampaign Seems clumsy. But ActiveCampaign has a couple of additional features, especially in automation. You can read the ActiveCampaign vs Drip post to find out more.
Is Drip better than ConvertKit?
Both have a good user interface, but when it comes to automation and advanced features, Drip is better than ConvertKit.
Is Drip better than Mailchimp?
MailChimp is more oriented towards email marketing newsletters and has basic automation features. But Drip is designed for marketing automation and e-commerce. Refer to the post - MailChimp vs Drip to find out more.
Final Verdict
If you're a serious e-commerce business owner who needs advanced marketing automation, Drip Is obvious to you.
As you've seen in the deliverability reports, Drip deliverability is by far the best.
Drip is also suitable for more advanced digital marketers who need good automation features. However, in this case, ActiveCampaign Is a close competitor to Drip, it has a few additional functions, but is expensive.
If you've just started your online business with no budget, I wouldn't recommend Drip because it can be quite expensive for you.
