Drip Email Marketing Software Review
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- Date Established
- 2013
- Location
- Minneapolis, MN
Pros
- Feature-rich for eCommerce
- 90+ integrations
- Robust CRM platform reporting
Cons
- No phone support
- Buggy
- Clunky feature design
Overview
At its core, Drip email marketing software sits among a broader CRM platform that is built with eCommerce in mind. Drip accomplishes this by taking complex and disparate data and collects and syncs these data points in one place through tracking codes you’ll place (via Drip) across all of your owned digital channels. From your customer’s browsing history, social media interactions, cart abandonment and purchases, and, of course, email engagement, Drip delivers marketing analytics in a platform built for eCommerce like no other.
While Drip does focus on eCommerce through its features and integrations, any type of business could benefit from its platform to analyze, collect data, and personalize marketing for customers. Drip has earned a 4.5 rating for delivering a smart platform we think is worth a second look. Let’s explore the particulars so that you can decide if Drip’s software is a good option for your business.
Table of Contents
Pricing
Rating: Excellent
Drip has a very transparent pricing model. Its entire platform scales by the number of subscribers you have. With Drip’s instant sliding calculator tool, I selected a few different price points as examples:
- Up to 2,500 people is $49/month
- 5K is $122/month
- 10K is $184/month
- 20K is $308/month
The pricing continues to scale incrementally upwards until you hit 160K people in your list and then you’ll need to call for a quote.
As you can see, the pricing plans available are pretty easy to understand. When we think about comparing the costs as relatively high or low with other email service providers, we need to keep a few things in mind. Typically, email marketing software companies offer additional features as you pay more, and thus, you can expect less at the lower tiers. But that’s not the case with Drip. If you compare price per contact alone with another company, keep in mind that with Drip, you get every feature in the platform at any price point. These include A/B testing, automated email workflows, list segmentation, and its eCommerce CRM tools as well.
Because Drip provides a great value for the cost and exceeds standard features in the beginning tiers, I’m confident in giving the company an excellent rating in this category. Additionally, you can try the Drip platform for free without giving out your credit card information — which is always a very nice bonus in my book.
Cloud-Based (SAAS) Or Locally-Installed
Drip is a cloud-based service, and no local installation is necessary.
Hardware & Software Requirements
As an entirely cloud-based service, you only have to worry about an internet connection and a browser, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. You will need to install a JavaScript snippet provided by Drip so that the dashboard can report back your analytics, and you can view it properly.
Specific Size Of Business
Drip is built to scale up subscriber-wise, and so all its features are with you from the beginning, which is nice if you’re a small business with a little list and a big dream. That said, Drip is probably best suited for a business that is past the “dabbling phase” and has a large enough of a list already to dig into the platform’s full set of features.
While Drip is a company that focuses most of its features on empowering eCommerce businesses, the core features would suit any size or type of business and give you room to scale up or down as needed.
Ease Of Use
Rating: Excellent
As far as creating your first email campaign with Drip, you’ll find it remarkably easy to use despite its complexities. The visual email editor brings a relatively generous amount of freedom in template options and design, and it’s easy to add or remove segments, buttons, and images where you want them.
When it comes to building your automated workflow, you’ll find it relatively straightforward, but if you get stuck, you can easily reference the User Manual or ask for help via chat (more on that below). Overall, Drip does a good job of simplifying the funnel process with easy-to-follow workflows so that you can connect what you need.
When you’re ready to dive into Drip and use all of it’s CRM features to support your email marketing campaign, you can expect to face a bit of a learning curve if you’re going to utilize the feature set properly. However, because Drip makes it easy to sign up and has a relatively straightforward design along with generous support tools, including webinars, courses, guides, and other resources, Drip earns an excellent in the ease-of-use category.
Features
As a full eCommerce customer relationship management (eCRM) and email marketing platform, Drip has a lot to offer. Below, I have highlighted a few features that illustrate how Drip’s platform focuses on engagement.
- Customer Data & Insights: As your customers interact with you through your campaign and integrated apps, you’ll start gaining insight. By creating tags as well as tracking interactions your customers have with you, your data starts to form an organized picture. And as the eCommerce-focused solution that it is, you can also integrate other apps, such as Facebook, WooCommerce, and Shopify, so that you can connect your data points for a snapshot of each customer’s actions with you.
- Personalized Campaigns: Drip is a powerhouse when it comes to personalizing and offers a few different ways you can accomplish this with your customers. Once your customer data insights start coming in through your dashboards, you can hit the ground running with deeper segmentation. Your tags and triggered events can help you show up with behavior-based automatic workflows that deliver on-point emails. And with the Facebook integration, you can then use those insights to create personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram just for them, based on what those users browsed or shopped. Additionally, Drip has a Custom Fields feature that helps you add personalized details in emails to your customers based on behavior or buying activity, including when they view a product or place an order. I particularly like the prebuilt workflows for shopping cart abandonment, including the integrated solutions with Magento or Shopify.
- Optimization: There are a few features in the back end of Drip that help you optimize your marketing campaigns. First, your workflow and campaign dashboards allow you to analyze performance and compare strategies across platforms. What compliments this is the Automatic Revenue Attribution feature. With it, you can connect your eCommerce store with Drip and find out which digital marketing strategies are leading your customers to the final sale and improving your bottom line. Another great feature is the Workflow Split Testing feature that helps you test your automated workflows and see if what you’re doing is effective. One note, however, is that you need to set up an automated workflow to utilize this A/B testing.
- Managing Email Deliverability: An unmonitored and unmanaged email list could be why an email campaign may not be doing as well as you think. I’m glad to see that Drip supports managing these issues with a guide that, first of all, brings awareness to the issue and then walks you through some things to improve. To help build a solid list in the first place, Drip provides an opt-in form so that you can get your contacts’ permission before sending ongoing communication. It may be hard to hear, but this extra step is crucial to getting a good outcome. Your email is more likely to be opened by someone who has explicitly agreed to receive it. Otherwise, you may get sent to the Spam folder, which can undermine the rest of your efforts over the long haul. Drip also monitors hard and soft bounce rates and provides automation tools to re-engage readers or help you clean them from your list.
What Drip Is Missing
While Drip is focused on the needs of eCommerce and does deliver great tools for segmenting and automation, it does lack some basic features you’ll find in other email marketing software. For instance, Mailchimp provides landing pages, more social media cross-marketing tools, and options in rendering features that Drip just doesn’t have. Many (including myself) would consider landing pages as a given in a platform that is focused on the customer journey, so I’m pretty surprised it is lacking with Drip. While you can make landing pages within Drip, you’ll have to rely on purchasing an integration from Leadpages to do it.
However, overall, Drip’s feature set is good, delivering on the promise of supporting your email marketing and your eCRM efforts with ample features. The dashboards, workflow tools, and all of the features that help you tackle some of the biggest challenges in eCommerce are built right in from the get-go.
Customer Service & Support
When you’re working, you never have to wonder how you’re going to contact Drip. There is an easy-to-spot button that begins your chat session wherever you are. Our experience with Drip support is, overall, a positive one. Service is friendly, knowledgeable, and they can work through the problem fairly quickly. I love that they send you a history of your conversation via email after the fact so that you can reference any instructions and have a record of the conversation should it be needed. You can also email support, but response times are considerably longer, so your best bet is to start the chat window.
What’s a little disappointing for some is that no matter how big your account is, Drip doesn’t seem to offer any sort of phone support or dedicated account service, which is a bit of a surprise, to be honest. When you consider how complicated the eCRM platform may become when you dive into the deeper complexities, I can imagine that many would probably prefer a phone call.
That said, Drip has muscled up all of its self-service resources since our last review. Under the Learn tab, you can use the search tool if you’re looking for something specific. The blog is very well done with filtering for categories geared for agencies, best practices, case studies, eCommerce, email marketing, marketing automation, and news. You can also access the easily navigable User Manual, guides, courses, webinars, and general resources and articles. There is a lot of information there to help you on your journey.
In creating all of these in-depth resources, Drip understands that its customers may not come in with all the knowledge necessary when it comes to digital marketing, but all the tools are there to help walk you through. Because of the robust amount of options it offers and a chat option that has proven to be helpful with mostly positive reviews, Drip earns a Good rating overall in this category.
User Reviews
Rating: Excellent
Overall, users of Drip report they are happy with the results. Negative reviews are relatively benign and sparse. Below, we’ve highlighted some common complaints and praises for Drip.
Negative Reviews & Complaints
I headed over to G2 to find out a little bit more about what other people thought of the platform. Of the 299 reviews, only eighteen reviewers rated Drip at below three stars. Here’s what the pains were:
- Complicated Interface: Some types of smaller businesses find Drip a little overwhelming at first and maybe even overkill for their needs. Options in sorting contacts and workflows may feel complicated.
- Relatively High Cost: Cost is certainly something to consider, as it is a little higher than some of its competitors. In my opinion, the difference is that Drip offers all of its core features at every level, so there are fewer savings in smaller tiers comparatively. This setup works best for a company that already has marketing goals and is ready to get started, even with a smaller list.
- No Phone Customer Service: The complicated platform and having no phone customer service can be a perfect storm for customer frustration.
These reviewers said:
It’s not as straight forward as I would like. Some of the ways you get to things, as well as some of the processes that have to be taken are kind of hidden within menus.
And…
There are a lot of options for how to sort contacts, workflows for online shopping and newsletters. Which is great if you need all of that, but makes interfacing very complicated. We’re a small operation (a gym) that does all of our services in person.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
Drip gets almost overwhelmingly positive reviews. Of the 299 reviewers on G2, 280 gave it a 4-star or above rating out of five. Here are a few general things people love about this app:
- Integrations: In particular, users appreciate the ability to link Shopify and other eCommerce solutions to their Drip accounts. These integrations allow Drip to accomplish the goal of supporting eCommerce shops by delivering organized data from more points in the customer’s buying journey.
- Automation: Automation of some form is standard in most email marketing apps, and Drip users appreciate the workflows. While even reviewers who rate Drip highly cite that it feels a bit complicated at first, they also say that the freedom in tagging, rules, and automation creation has empowered their marketing efforts overall.
- Easy Workflow: Yes, you’ll find users who both complain and praise Drip for its workflow interface. Five-star reviews praise Drip for simplifying its funnel process. It all depends on the skill and comfort level of the user.
This reviewer shares:
Drip is an extremely intuitive platform to use allowing users to quickly and easily build complex campaigns. I love the email editor. Best one that I have used by far. It’s fully responsive and allows you to quickly toggle between edit and preview across all devices. The learning curve for learning Drip is extremely low. You can start building your first campaign in less than an hour of logging on for the first time. The ability to segment your lists is extremely easy to implement.
Integration into your website is simple and there is a long list of other platforms and solutions that Drip integrates with to create a powerful comprehensive marketing solution. The price combined with the list of features and powerful functionality kicks the butt of much more expensive solutions that are on the market. Drip is a modern marketing solution that doesn’t feel like it was built in the 90s… unlike other tools on the market. I have deployed Drip within several organizations and I will continue to recommend it as a top tier marketing solution.
Integrations & Add-Ons
Rating: Excellent
Drip has a wide range of integrations that allow you to connect your eCommerce store and social accounts to obtain data and tracking for your customers. While Drip does not offer SMS messaging, landing pages, or rendering within the main platform, you can find an app to integrate and add those features when you need them. Here are the categories of integrations you can search for to connect with your Drip account:
- Analytics
- Customer support
- Direct mail
- eCommerce
- Email verification
- Event management
- Forms and surveys
- Lead capture
- Marketing automation
- Membership
- Payment processing
- Scheduling
- SMS
- Social integration
- Video
- Webinar
Additionally, the bot on the page asks if you have a specific integration you are looking for. That tells me that Drip is willing to make it happen for you if you have a need not listed. With 90 integrations and developers on-hand ready to help you find what you need, Drip earns an Excellent in this category for the well-rounded options it does provide.
Security
Drip maintains ongoing efforts to remain compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Be aware, however, that Drip’s platform is not HIPAA compliant and does not provide encryption and the security level required to become HIPAA compliant. You could still utilize Drip if you did require HIPAA security if you encrypted on your end or offered a secure download link rather than transmitting directly via email.
Drip is very transparent about incident history, and you can peruse issues, which typically involve delays in sending an email or some software bugs in the visual email editor. That said, there are a few issues that render the “somewhat buggy” reputation that Drip has among some users.
Final Verdict
When we look at Drip’s entire platform, it is easy to see that it is a well-designed solution that can solve cross-marketing challenges that face today’s eCommerce shop. With robust personalization and automation tools, you can drill down into the funnel and reach your customers exactly where they are in the buying journey — and for that, Drip certainly deserves serious consideration.
Because Drip is best for marketers or those who are at least familiar with digital marketing strategies, I recommend trying Drip before you buy and utilizing the free trial before committing. Otherwise, you may feel in over your head with Drip’s feature-set.
Overall, I’m confident in giving Drip a 4.5 out of 5 stars, as it successfully delivers on the promise of a comprehensive eCRM platform. Want more options that let you try before you buy? Check out our post, The Best Free Email Marketing Software Programs.
Emily Hale
Emily is a writer, strategist, and freelance consultant based in Indianapolis. She is driven to create content that empowers her readers and her clients to make better choices in their business and their lives. When she's not in the thick of researching and developing blogs for Merchant Maverick, she likes to cook from scratch for her family or escape outdoors and meander through nature with her rescue pup.
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