Drip Email Marketing Review 2020

Drip in a NutShell

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

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.

Integrations

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.

Automation

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

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.

Pricing

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

Customer Service

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.