Drip Review: Is It Any Good?

Email marketing is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. But it’s a necessity for any type of company, especially for e-commerce business owners.

But here’s some good news:

There are cloud-based email marketing software with automation features, email templates, and other features that make it easier to reach out and grow your audience.

Interesting, right?

The email marketing platform we’re focusing on today is Drip. And in this Drip review, we’ll go over all of its perks, pricing, and features that make it a better solution than other comparable products.

Let’s start with an explanation of what Drip is exactly.

What is Drip?

Drip offers email marketing software that’s aimed toward e-commerce marketers. You can use it to generate new leads through engaging forms that appear at the right place and time. It also allows you to automatically send emails and SMS messages with tempting promotional content, support email, or send follow-ups to users who abandoned their shopping carts.

But here’s an important note:

You don’t need to have an e-commerce store to take full advantage of Drip. It’ll work even for a marketing automation geek who’d just like to make sending emails a little bit easier.

This software also comes with reporting features that give you a better idea of your email marketing campaign’s performance. You can even tag users so you can tailor-fit your message to select people.

To simplify:

You can have Drip send emails automatically based on what a user does or doesn’t do.

If you want, you can send an email if a recipient opens an email or not. Or you can email someone who subscribes to your mailing list. If you’re running an event and a user signs up for it, you can automatically send a confirmation email with all of the event’s details.

You can even send a marketing email on the anniversary of an event like on the anniversary of your customer’s first purchase.

Note: While Drip is mainly aimed at e-commerce sites, it can work equally well for other types of businesses.

Drip features

After reading Drip’s features, I’m sure you’ll agree that this email marketing solution is great value for money. Let’s see how using Drip can help your business.

Customizable forms

With Drip, you can create your own forms for lead capture without writing a single line of code. There is a drag-and-drop functionality built right into Drip so you can come up with professional-looking forms minus the hassle.

You’ll have the ability to customize the buttons, fonts, and overall style of your forms. Plus, you’ll have control over who sees these forms as well as when they pop up on your page.

Here’s an example:

Say you have users who recently abandoned their carts. You could trigger the form to appear to those people. You could show discounts to encourage them to push through with the transaction.

You can also use these forms to get potential leads to leave their phone number and other contact information.

Email and SMS automation

Drip offers SMS and email marketing automation that you can use to promote your products and services. You can send notifications to several subscribers — as to how many will depend on the plan you select.

Email marketing is important because it will help you build lasting relationships. Marketing emails also facilitate the customer journey which leads to more sales.

And it’s also a tool for your sales team or customer service representatives to reach out to everyone on your email list to answer concerns that your leads could have about your business.

As with the customizable forms, you can customize emails without coding. Drip uses a visual email builder that lets you drag elements and drop them in the email composer. Not only does this make your emails easy to build, but it also makes your emails look like they were made by professionals, helping you to stand out.

And you can just as easily create SMS messages that look just as beautiful as your emails (SMS messages available as an add-on).

Other capabilities include being able to customize the emails based on customer behavior. Just tell Drip who you’d like to receive your emails or SMS and it will find the appropriate recipients.

A/B testing

It doesn’t matter how proficient you are at designing emails. You won’t know what elements work until you test them out.

Fortunately, Drip comes with an A/B testing feature that will allow a marketer to launch two versions of the same page at the same time and compare both.

You’ll be able to see which version gets more views, clicks, and revenue. This way, you’re able to make the necessary changes you’ll need to optimize your emails for conversion.

Automation Workflows

Automation Workflows is what allows you to set and forget your email campaigns. Once you set it up, Automation Workflows will trigger responses based on what a customer does.

Those who are new to Drip can try one of the recommended workflows. When you get the hang of it, you can customize a workflow to send emails based on customer behavior. For example, you can send an email right after a customer makes a purchase.

Another use case is for welcome emails. Once a user signs up to your website, you can send emails that highlight your products, display your social proofs, show your social media accounts, stature your mission, promote limited-time offers, and other marketing materials.

Some of the available workflow templates work with third-party tools like Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce.

Social media Drip segments

You can sync Facebook and Instagram with Drip to create marketing campaigns across these social media channels.

Reporting

The built-in reporting capabilities will let you track people and group them to better understand their progress. This gives you the option to make adjustments as you go along with your Drip campaigns.

Integrations

Drip works with over 100 companies to introduce more functionality to your workflows. Not only can you connect it to Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, but you also have the option to use tools like Facebook Custom Audiences, ClickFunnels, Instapage, Kajabi, Leadpages, OptinMonster, PayPal, Stripe, Sumo, Unbounce, Typeform, and Zapier.

Here’s a full list of all Drip’s third-party integrations.

Drip automation builder explained

Drip is a great value for money but you’ll need to understand its automation features to make the most out of it.

To use Drip’s marketing automation tools, you’ll need to set up rules. Click “New Rule”. Drip provides a list of rules to choose from.

Once the rules are set up, you can designate the trigger that will make Drip take action. Of course, you’ll need to state what that action is so Drip knows what to do.

The trigger can be an event that comes from Drip or one of the integrations available. If you want the trigger to come from Drip, select Drip from the drop-down menu. Otherwise, you’ll have to select a different source.

You can also set who the trigger applies to. You can narrow down the list by applying filters.

As for the action itself, you’ll need to select one from the drop-down menu. If Drip is selected, you’ll only see actions that are available for Drip. If you select another source, only actions available for that provider are shown.

Drip actions

What kind of actions can you do using Drip to improve your email campaign?

Here’s a quick list:

• Apply a tag — Assigns a tag to users who trigger the rule
• Delete a person — Removes the person from your account
• Flag as a prospect — Starts lead scoring for a person if the setting is activated
• Move to another campaign — Delete a person from an active campaign then move to another
• Record a conversion — Track a user’s conversion
• Record a custom event — Record a given custom event
• Remove a tag — Remove the user’s assigned tag
• Remove from campaign — Remove the user from a specific campaign
• Remove from workflow — Get a user out of a specific workflow
• Restart a campaign — Get a user back to the beginning of a campaign
• Send a campaign — Add a user to a campaign
• Send a notification email — Get a notification email about a user
• Send a one-off email — Send the user an email
• Unflag as a prospect — Stop lead scoring if the setting is activated
• Unsubscribe a person — Unsubscribe a user from a campaign or mailings

There are other actions available but this list should give you an idea of what you can do through automation.

One downside to using Drip is that you’ll need to create an automation sequence that adds a tag if you want to set up double confirmation. It’s not a dealbreaker for most folks since it’s fairly easy to do. But it’s something that you’ll need to learn how to do, meaning it becomes part of the learning curve.

Drip pricing

So how much does Drip cost? Drip pricing is pretty straightforward. We’ve mentioned before that Drip is a great value for money. The reason why is that the amount you pay will depend on how many people there are on your email list.

That means there’s only one plan available. You get all of the features. There are no tiers that limit your experience.

The starting price is $39 per month. This lets you handle up to 2,500 contacts.

Regardless of how many contacts you enter, you’ll still receive the same benefits like unlimited email sends and account users, email support, access to the email builder tool and forms, A/B testing, automation, and reporting.

You can also create sub accounts for other websites you run. These help you keep costs down for multiple sites and keep projects separate.

With Drip, you can simply create a new sub account and those subscribers would be counted towards the limit on your main account.

There is a 14-day free trial offering that should give you a better idea of what Drip can do and if it’s right for you. Just note that the free trial does not include the SMS and MMS capabilities. You don’t have to enter your credit card information for the free trial.

Drip pros and cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of signing up for a Drip account.

Pros

• Visual email builder — Create eye-catching emails that convert.
• Advanced automation – Most email marketing providers offer stripped back automation but that isn’t the case with Drip.
• Advanced reporting — With Drip’s reporting you will know exactly what is going on with your email marketing.
• Plenty of integrations — With over 100 integrations, you can perform a lot of actions.
• Flexible pricing — You only pay for what you need. You only need to upgrade when you grow your contacts.
• Email segmentation — Use Drip’s powerful tagging functionality to segment your audience and send highly targeted emails.
• Optional SMS marketing — Want to add SMS messages to your marketing stack? Drip now has this functionality too.
• Basic form builder — Add basic opt-in forms to your website with Drip’s form builder.
• Sub-accounts — Do you run multiple sites? You can create separate sub-accounts for each website without having to have multiple subscriptions.

Cons

• Automation requires practice — Getting the automation feature to work perfectly will require some practice.
• Learning curve required — While the interface is clean and better than some other platforms, it’s definitely not the easiest to use. Some important features are hidden behind toggle links that aren’t obvious.
• Expensive — Despite the flexible pricing, Drip is still relatively more expensive than other alternatives.

Verdict

We have tested a large number of email marketing and automation platforms but Drip stands out as one of the best.

While they are pitched more towards ecommerce sites, they offer one of the best email automation feature sets on the market. And the platform is far easier to use than other automation platforms.

So, if you’re looking for serious email automation that can grow your business while you sleep – Drip is one of the best out there.

But ultimately it is your opinion that matters most, so I highly recommend that you check out their free trial to make sure this platform is a good fit for the needs of your business.

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