Drip

Pluspunten

If you sell a lot of different types of products and customers, Drip's ability to help you segment people automatically is amazing. We switched from MailChimp to Drip when Shopify broke and MC broke up but we also needed something more robust for our click and brick as our ecomm started to take off. I love that you can trigger events based on actions like when a subscriber clicks on a certain page on your website and the Facebook custom audience integration is very useful and has upped our targeting strategy on social too. Looking back on what we were doing with MailChimp vs. Drip, I kind of just laugh. They're hard to even compare. This is a full blown marketing and CRM suite and Mailchimp just sends emails. I still feel like I have more I can learn and do with Drip which is exciting. Support is very helpful and quick.

Minpunten

The email builder is improving but needs work still-you need to really inbox test because it will not save you from yourself. Images are skewed in some email clients if you check the "constrain image" box for example, so don't check that box! There are some other weird bugs in it but they just came out with a new version which is for sure an improvement. You can now select your products from your Shopify store which is HUGE but I would love more flexibility on integrating products and collections dynamically. The alt text doesn't work in the builder which seems weird to me and I don't have a big enough team to hand code the amount of eblasts we send.

I want to add I don't think this is for the casual marketer. In other words, you could get overwhelmed very easily by the bells and whistles so while this is awesome for marketing automation geeks, I would make sure it isn't too complicated for your business goals.

Pluspunten

I've seriously tried it all over the past 5 years. From Campaign Monitor, to Get Response. Infusionsoft to Mailchimp. Convertkit, Active Campaign, and that's just the well-known ones. Some for small stints (think 1 - 3 months) others for longer stints (6 - 12). Drip is the only one that I've been using for well over 12 months and am feeling very comfortable with. Down to why this software is great - simply put, most of it's core functionalities are well thought out and easy to use. But then advanced things can still be done even if you're a novice to marketing automation. Sending drip campaigns, setting up subscribe forms and linking with other software to create automatons, all super easily done. Overall is a really well thought out piece of software, and the easiest to use considering its power.

Minpunten

Some things are quite tricky to do. For example, you would expect to be able to set a simple trigger link in an email, except that requires setting up a completely separate automation. You can't set triggers to happen at certain times, and it can be a pain to get your email template looking good (plain templates are awesome but sometimes you just want to be able to adjust things to make it more personal). Adding call-to-action buttons to emails is also insanely difficult, simply getting the colors to match your own brand is impossible. But all these are minor gripes in the grand scheme of things!

Pluspunten

Drip has the powerful automation features that you often have to pay thousands of dollars more a year for with marketing suite platforms. If you only need the automated email portion and not all the other features, Drip delivers a streamlined experienced that's designed to cater to B2B users that want to utilize nurture campaigns to cultivate and convert leads. Because of this, creating workflows is incredibly simple and intuitive. The platform also has some interesting features you don't find in many other ESPs, such as being able to check a box to re-send emails using a different subject line to contacts who don't open the first one. It also does not deal with contacts in lists, but rather contacts live in only one instance in the platform and rather than using lists to segment your contacts, you use tags. Some may dislike this approach, but I personally find being able to get away from endless lists to be liberating.

Minpunten

The platform lacks a WYSIWG editor, and only works with html or plain text. While this may be fine for many users, it might be off-putting for those less tech-savvy users who are used to creating and editing emails inside of their ESP. Also, the platform, in my opinion, is deceptively counter-intuitive despite its simple appearances. As someone who has used several of the popular ESPs on the market (Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, Stampready, etc...) I found the process to create and send emails confusing and had to contact support several times initially. This was rather frustrating because at the time they only offered support via email. I understand that they are trying to expand support to other methods however. I like to call someone if I'm having a problem, so the lack of phone support was a miss for me.

Pluspunten

Drip is the dream marketing software I was dreaming of back in 2012 when I first started with another expensive email/marketing automation platform.

Out of the box, Drip doesn't need 3rd party apps to format data like making sure names are capitalized.

I am a marketing automation geek, and Drip allows you to add just about any other type of marketing software layer like surveys, onsite retargeting, send text messages, and even integrate Facebook messenger and Facebook ads just to name a few. (Some 3rd party apps required)

Using Drip and a few items I mentioned above, you can passively profile and lead score all of your prospects to see:

- which ones are hot (Drip can send an email to your sales team so they make contact),
- which ones are still in research mode (send these leads more content to help them make a decision via email, SMS or a Facebook message),
- and which ones are just tire kickers.

No sense running paid ads to tire kickers, right?

You can even personalize your website so that people who downloaded your freebie, don't get asked to download it again. That is powerful! (3rd party app needed)

I have moved all of my clients over to Drip from 3 other platforms and we are seeing much better results.

If you are considering email & marketing automation automation software for your business, take a good look at Drip.

They have a certification program, so you might want to check out graduates to lend you a hand if needed.

Pluspunten

It's very simple create workflows for automating email flow. This has allowed us to completely transform the way we do our email marketing in our digital product e-commerce business.

I also like how simple it is to setup a new campaign. Most other tools put you through complicated settings to setup new sequences. In Drip you just see a list of the emails on the campaign and you can quickly and easily adjust the days/timing of when people receive those emails after subscribing to the campaign.

There is no over the top process for editing the actual emails and you have a choice between a simple editor (which I like as it gets great engagement) or for more visual promotions you can use the graphical editor which is really just as simple to use.

Minpunten

I found it better to utilise a third party software like Optinmonster to handle the actual signup forms because I get more flexibility surrounding the design of the popup. That is one area in which I think Drip could improve by offering more control surrounding that popup editing experience.