Drip Review: Features and Pricing 2021

Drip in a NutShell

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What is Drip ?

Whether you’re a small startup or an already established brand, email marketing software is a convenient tool for maintaining steady growth for your business. Drip offers an intriguing solution for small businesses thanks to its personalization and analytics capabilities. Its toolkit equips business owners with everything they need to make their email marketing campaigns a success.

Drip Pros & Cons

PROS

• Plenty of eCommerce tools: Drip is primarily used by eCommerce businesses. This software features great integrations with major platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento. There are numerous ready-made automation geared toward eCommerce and customer behavior tracking features. 
• Excellent CRM: This tool can connect seamlessly with a variety of CRM software choices like Insightly and GoSquared. Moreover, the platform’s REST API allows you to integrate any other CRM with Drip.  
• Thorough tracking and reporting: Drip offers an impressive array of reports that are nicely displayed. From campaign metrics such as email open rates, clicks, unsubscribe or reply rates to social media tracking, comparison reports, and ROI analysis. This platform offers all the reports you need to track your customers and your campaign’s efficiency. 
• Great segmentation tools:  With this software, you can easily put together lists based on a wide choice of criteria and apply tags according to customer’s behavior. Moreover, the useful events tool allows you to use these tags in a specific context (eg: purchase price, or tag date).

CONS

• Pricier than other platforms: Drip’s price can get steep if you have a large contact list. For only 500 contacts, you have to pay $19. With 5,000 contacts, for example, the price gets to $89 per month.
• No phone support: You get 24/7 email and chat support, along with an array of training resources. Drip doesn’t offer phone support.  
• Limited templates: Drip’s template offering is limited compared to many of its rivals. However, you can create your own templates using the visual builder.  

Who is Drip Good for?

• eCommerce businesses: Drip offers all the features you need to boost client engagement through email marketing, starting with its reliable integration with eCommerce platforms. The customizable pre-built automatic workflows are also targeted for this niche and aim to help you monitor customers throughout the sales funnel and engage them at any stage. 
•  Experienced marketers or beginners alike: Drip features a clean and straightforward interface that’s easy to navigate. The email building process can also be carried out pretty easily thanks to the drag-and-drop functionality. Moreover, for those who need advanced automation or reporting features, Drip offers a plethora of possibilities.  
• Anyone who’s looking for a free trial: Drip allows you to test its features for 14 days to get a feel of what you can obtain from their software before purchasing a subscription. 

Drip isn’t recommended for:

• Marketers who want a vast array of email templates: This is one of the areas where Drip could improve its offering. Although you get a rage of templates with Drip, their designs are limited compared to many of its rivals.  
• Those who need a wider choice of integrations: although it integrates seamlessly with most eCommerce platforms, Drip integrations package is pretty limited in other areas, for example - social media. 

Drip Key Features and Workflows

Creating Emails and Campaigns

• Emails Sent/Opened and Links Clicked – Drip features a comprehensive reporting option for emails sent/opened and links clicked, offering a detailed look into each campaign with graphs, charts, and statistics. Additionally, you can sort based on date/time, the status of the campaign, alphabetically, and more.
• Deliverability Rate and Delivery by Time Zone –  Drip offers a deliverability rate of around 89%, one of the highest in the industry. Moreover, you can schedule campaigns according to subscribers’ time zones, making it likelier that recipients will open your emails.  
• Creating and Importing Email Lists – I was also pleased to see that Drip lets you import your pre-existing list of contacts by bulk through its Imports/Bulk Ops feature. If you don’t have a list, you can always create new ones once you have started your campaign and add new users manually.
• Split Tests and A/B Tests – I was happy to find Drip’s A/B testing features, which let you quickly try out multiple campaign scenarios and see which campaign paths are effective and which aren’t. Using this tool increases the chances of success of present and future email marketing campaigns.
• Personalization – You can take advantage of Drip’s personalization features, which let you quickly customize your campaigns to fit your users’ preferences and places in your funnel .Additionally, you can create unique workflows to provide more relevant content to each segment on your mailing list.

Reporting and Analysis (Rated: 4/5)

The analytics offered by Drip are simple yet refined, giving you general and detailed insights into your campaigns’ performance, earning a score of 4.

The ability to monitor your campaign’s progress is vital to the development of your business and the success of future campaigns. Drip offers a simple yet refined way to track your email campaigns, giving you both a macro view of your campaigns and a more granular look at each email’s individual performance.

• Engagement Reports (Email Open Rate and CR Tracking) – Drip offers a convenient and comprehensive way to view your engagement reports, giving you the option to view the overall status or individually. you can view opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and reply rates based on chosen time frames, and display them either in a chart or dynamic visualization.
• Heat Maps – Unfortunately, Drip doesn’t offer heat maps for your emails. However, you can measure each link’s effectiveness and click-through rate to determine which are getting the most views and react accordingly.
• Campaign Comparison Report – You can compare your campaigns’ efficiency on Drip, although it does require some manual digging to find the right data. You can download each report and compare or find an integration that optimizes your reporting capabilities.
• Segmentation - One area where Drip shines is in segmentation. You can create user lists based on a variety of individual triggers, events, and even custom fields that let you better tailor your content and get more engagement and results.
• Social Media Tracking – Drip currently doesn’t offer a feature to track customers’ social media activity regarding their email campaigns, but it does let you connect your social media accounts to Drip to extend their reach to specific audiences.
• ROI Analysis – Perhaps its biggest strength is Drip’s ROI measuring, which lets you combine a variety of revenue streams to see how your campaigns are performing in real-time compared with your other existing lead generation channels. Drip enables you to efficiently analyze which campaigns are most effective, and how you can model future email marketing campaigns to maximize your returns.

Drip Integrations (Rated: 4/5)

The integrations offered by Drip are limited, especially for social media. However, those that are on offer are impressive, and cover well-known platforms such as PayPal and Shopify, earning them a score of 4.

The best email marketing software fits into your existing marketing infrastructure without adding unnecessary steps. I was pleasantly surprised to see that, while not as extensive as other software solutions, Drip still has a pretty impressive range of integrations – from popular payment processing software like PayPal to Ecommerce platforms like Magento.

• Google Analytics - Track where your subscribers go when they click on a link from your email campaign through Google Analytics. Drip offers the option to automatically add them in each email or override it when creating individual emails.
• API Integrations – With Drip’s API integrations, you can easily transfer important data from your apps and other tools with your Drip profile. By doing so, you can easily build stronger marketing strategies for future email marketing campaigns. More importantly, if you use tools not currently supported by Drip, you can build your own integrations to simplify your workflow.
• Ecommerce Software and Tools – Drip offers integrations with some of the most popular Ecommerce software solutions and tools like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. With this, you can integrate your online store with your Drip account and use the information to create more targeted campaigns based on customer purchases and behaviors.
• CRM Integrations – Drip has integrations with various CRM software, including GoSquared and Insightly. Additionally, you can create your own integrations for your preferred CRM with the company’s REST API.
• Social Media Integrations – Drip currently only offers integration with Facebook. It works by automatically triggering email campaign automation set by clients when potential customers show interest in your ads. This helps them reach a wider audience and generate more leads from more targeted Facebook ad campaigns.
• Apps – App integration is one of the essentials and must-haves of online businesses nowadays. Although not that extensive of a list, Drip features integration with various apps that make it easier for clients not just to connect to their customers but also to manage and organize their businesses.
• Plugins – I was pleased to see that Drip includes plugins for some of the most popular payment gateways (including PayPal), as well as features such as lead generating and scoring, SMS campaigns, shopping carts, and scheduling tools.

Drip Automation (Rated: 5/5)

Drip offers advanced automation capabilities, via either a workflow or a rule. The system is straightforward and easy enough that even beginners could create effective automations. I give them a score of 5.

One of the more interesting aspects of Drip’s service is its automation tool, which dispenses with lists and focuses instead on tags and events. This lets you create highly granular workflows based on a combination of factors, including trigger links, form submissions, and more actions.  Their automation system is perfect for sending follow-up emails once the conditions set by the user are triggered or met.

There are 2 ways their automation system works:

• Via a Workflow
• Via a Rule

Drip’s automation system is easy to use and straightforward enough that even beginners can create effective automation flows. While their selection for automation triggers may be limited, the way you can combine them with events and tags makes it much more versatile.

Design and Ease of Use (Rated: 4/5)

Drip allows you to create campaigns quickly and easily and seems designed to be as user friendly as possible, earning them a score of 4.

When it comes to software solutions, some of the most important features one needs to consider are the design and ease of use; both of which Drip offers in abundance. Drip’s interface lets you quickly and effectively create new emails, campaigns, and workflows.

• Drag-and-Drop Interface - Drip makes it easy and convenient by offering 3 types of email builders: Visual, Text, and HTML. Unfortunately, their drag=and-drop functionality is still quite limited, but the platform’s Liquid Language lets you create automatically customizable emails, and you can build emails entirely from scratch using Drip’s HTML builder.
• Landing Page Creator – A subscription with Drip allows you to access their landing page creator, which lets you create stunning landing pages that will entice your visitors and turn them into customers.
• Email Templates – This is one area where Drip could up its offerings. There is a small library of email templates, but it is much more restricted than many of its competitors. However, the company’s visual designer makes it easy to build unique emails.
• Sign-up Forms Within Newsletters Tool – If you want to build your contact database and extend your company’s reach, then sign-up forms are a great way to do so. Drip makes it easy with their various options for creating sign-up forms. They operate on a strict opt-in model which means your subscribers will need to agree to receive emails.

Drip Deliverability (Rated: 5/5)

Drip’s deliverability rate is one of the highest in the market, with features such as time-zone scheduling which improves your open rate. Drip earns a score of 5.

The deliverability rate for Drip is around 89%, which is one of the highest on offer industry wide. Features such as time-zone scheduling, and geographic segmentation are available to ensure that your recipients will receive your emails at a time they are more likely to engage.

Drip pricing (Rated: 4/5)

Drip can get expensive if you have a vast contact list, and there is no free version, only a 14-day free trial. However, this trial does allow for you to experience the software before committing. Overall, Drip earns a score of 4.

Free Trial

• Price: N/A
• Access to and ability to test all available features of the paid subscription
• Available only for 14 days upon signing up

Paid Subscription

• Price: Starts from $49 on a monthly basis
• Access to all features
• Detailed reporting and analytics
• 24/7 email and chat support
• Unlimited user accounts

Drip offers a 14-days free trial period in which you can test almost all the platform’s tools. The SMS marketing feature is only available with the paid plans whose prices start at $19 per month for a maximum of 500 contacts and rise according to the number of contacts. There is also a pay-as-you-go plan for the SMS/MMS features, and its price also varies based on the number of contacts. 

Drip cancellation/refund policy 

Drip allows you to cancel your subscription at any time from your account’s billing settings. For a refund request, you should get in touch with the support team. 

Drip alternatives

Omnisend - Omnisend is a great alternative to Drip because this is another platform that mainly targets eCommerce businesses. It integrates with Shopify and plenty of other platforms. You can easily monitor and tailor a personalized customer journey with this software’s automation tools. There’s a wide array of ready-made workflows you can use for online stores: abandoned cart, product reviews, welcome emails, customer feedback, etc. Omnisend also offers you the possibility to combine email marketing with SMS and MMS automations. 

MailerLite - This email marketing platform features a modern and intuitive interface, which makes it an ideal choice for beginners. Just like Drip, it provides an easy email-building experience and great integrations with top eCommerce platforms. MalerLite also offers email templates, the ability to build forms and landing pages, and different automations and list management features. 

Constant Contact - This old and reputable player is another great choice for eCommerce and not only. Constant Contact features a good array of integrations and an intuitive email editor. It also offers plenty of possibilities to track your campaign’s results and boost their engagement, as well as good automations and pre-built templates. 

Drip Customer Service (Rated: 3/5)

Drip does offer support services over email and live chat, as well as via the demos provided by the company to interested clients. However, they do not offer phone support and so only earn a score of 3.

Drip offers various channels for contact such as email and live chat support. Aside from this, you can find a detailed step by step guide on how to navigate the site and answers to some of the most common questions new users have. The company also offers demos to interested clients and various other resources to help you and other clients navigate the site more easily.

• Contact Information:
  To access their customer service, you can click here

My Verdict

Using Drip to create email campaigns was surprisingly simple to deploy given its entire system was designed for ease of use.

The software features a dedicated section for creating campaigns, with the option to either use one of their pre-existing campaign blueprints or create your own from scratch.

What I Liked About Drip

Overall, what I liked about Drip is the comprehensive guide they offer their clients, allowing them to get a feel for the interface even before they sign up. Aside from this, they also offer enough time to explore every feature they have to offer before committing to a paid subscription which can help solidify potential customers’ decisions. I also liked how easy it is to navigate, which is perfect for beginners in the email marketing software industry.

What I Didn’t Like About Drip

The only thing I didn’t like about Drip is that it has limited offerings when it comes to integrations, especially for social media. However, the integrations they do offer are quite impressive which is more than enough for most. Moreover, if you use a certain integration that they don’t offer, you can suggest your preferred integration and they will do their best to add it to their list.