In this post, I’ll be presenting you with a Drip review and also will be discussing whether the tool is worth the price or not.
I will help you decide for yourself whether this tool is suitable for you or not.
Type | Email marketing and automation platform |
Starting price | $49/mo |
Features | 1. A/B testing 2. Advanced automation workflows 3. Excellent deliverability 4. Flexible tagging 5. Excellent native integration |
Competitors | 1. ActiveCampaign 2. MailChimp |
Drip was developed to be an excellent eCommerce CRM with features like Deep segmentation, Behavior-based automation, Personalized content, Multichannel Touchpoints, etc. It was recently acquired by Leadpages.
If you are running a serious eCommerce business, you may need to give Drip a consideration.
Let us know how well Drip stacks up against its competitors like MailChimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, and others.
Drip Review
What did I like?
- It allows flexible tagging, you can apply tags to your subscribers manually or via advanced automation workflows
- It has the best in the class advanced automation workflow
- The UI/UX is very refined and feels super-modern and sleek unlike say ActiveCampaign
- You can connect Facebook Lead Ads to Drip and collect information from people showing interest in your brand and products
- It has native integrations with almost all the eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc.
- Ability to remove Drip branding in all their paid plans
- It has really advanced tracking and reporting mechanisms as it is geared towards eCommerce users
- Excellent deliverability (according to our tests – report further down this page)
What I didn’t like?
- Premium price
- Can’t split test email content
- It doesn’t allow you to split test your automation workflows
- There are no email templates to use (not a big deal for me)
- Lack of robust form builder functionalities
Interface
The interface of Drip is very well refined. The UI is very sleek, refined and very fast.
Almost all the features are accessible using the top bar like the campaigns, broadcasts, people, forms, automation, and analytics. If there are any subfeatures you can use the drop-down.
When using some email automation software like ActiveCampaign, you may sometimes feel the need for referring to their documentation or help articles.
But in the case of Drip, all the options are so intuitively arranged that you rarely find yourself lost discovering a feature.
List management
In Drip, you’ll have the following things:
- People (subscribers)
- Segments
- Tags
You can’t create multiple lists. All your subscribers are visible under the people tab.
As Drip is also meant to be a CRM, they call subscribers as “People” and it makes sense as it’s geared towards eCommerce business owners.
You can add individual people using the “New person” button or import them from your other application using the Imports/Bulk ops feature.
You can create segments and save them for future targeting. There are many conditions for you to play with.
Some special conditions in this section are lifetime value, EU consent, user ID, timezones, ZIP, events performed (very versatile along with integrations), and much more.
Using the Events condition alone, you can segment the people like:
- Have visited a particular page on your website
- Added a product to a shopping cart but didn’t checkout (cart abandonment)
- Purchased a specific product
- Returned a particular product
- And dozens of more
When it comes to tags, you can have multiple of them per person you have. The tags can be added to people manually or when people perform any action or go through the workflow.
For example, whenever a person abandons the cart, you can add them a tag to separately target them with marketing emails.
The Rules section under automation comes really handy when applying tags to people based on certain conditions.
Here in the above example, I’ve shown you a demo of how you can add a tag whenever your people open any email that you have sent.
Drip also offers you superior list cleanup features. It lets you create multiple pruning operations so that when your people meet specific conditions, they’ll be automatically unsubscribed.
Having the option to create multiple pruning operations is very useful especially if you are dealing with multiple eCommerce businesses under one platform.
And also, especially nowadays, cleaning up for a list is becoming very important and Drip enables you to do this automatically by specifying the rules.
Email campaigns and broadcasts
In Drip, campaigns and broadcasts are two different terminologies.
A campaign refers to a set of emails that are sent to a person over a period of time.
Here in the above example, you can see there are four emails in a single campaign and all the emails can be sent to the people as per the delay that has been set.
For any campaign to be executed, it needs to be triggered using automation builder or in any other places.
On the other hand, broadcasts feature allows you to communicate with your people on demand, similar to sending out newsletters.
You can either use the visual builder, or the text/HTML editor.
As per my experience using many elements, graphic-rich designs trigger the promotional email flag in Gmail.
So, I always prefer sending out emails with minimal branding.
Once you select the type of campaign, enter in the name, select the people/segment whom you want to broadcast, you need to compose your email.
Here you have access to Recently Edited Emails and as well as Pre-designed Emails.
You can also start building your email from scratch.
You can drag and drop the elements into the email area to start building your email.
Inside the email builder, they have another section called “Edit Global Styles” that allows you to set the default settings for email, text format, and buttons.
Trust me, the Global Styles is such an essential feature that allows all your emails to have a consistency in design and functionality.
Once you finish building your email, you can preview the email on desktop, mobile and tablet screens.
You also have access to advanced Liquid templating feature with Drip.
You can make use of Liquid tags and conditions to tailor your emails for different kinds of subscribers based on their behaviors, tags, fields and other conditions.
This feature is popular with email marketing software like InfusionSoft, CampaignMonitor, etc.
You may need to learn the basics of Liquid in order to make full use of this feature or you can make use of some Liquid Cheat Sheets available online.
You can also automatically resend the broadcasts to people who’ve not opened your email within a period of time!
With Drip, you have a special feature called “Expiring links”.
Here, when you include the above link URL in any of your campaigns, broadcasts or workflows, the URL will be replaced with the “Expiration URL” once the set expiration time is elapsed.
This is a nice feature to use whenever you are sending a time-sensitive offer.
Automation
When it comes to automation, there are:
- Workflows
- Rules
With Workflows, you can build your automation workflow using their visual builder.
You can see above is an example of the “Cart Abandonment Split Test”. You can see that I’ve set multiple triggers. You can set as many triggers as you want for the workflow to run.
There are dozens of triggers to choose from Drip alone, and also various other apps you connect with Drip using their API.
When it comes to steps, as of now there are 7 types of steps.
The action, delay, decision (conditional logic), are the most used ones.
In actions too there are dozens of them by Drip and as well as other apps.
They have around 18 triggers and 16 actions of writing this post. When you compare this to ActiveCampaign, the latter has 20 triggers and 27 actions.
I would say when it comes to powerful automation workflows, ActiveCampaign is the winner in the industry and Drip is a close runner-up.
Now let’s take a look at the “Rules” feature.
With rules, you can set simple triggers and actions.
For example, if someone clicks on a trigger link you can add them a tag. Or when someone purchases a product on Shopify add them a tag on Drip to segment them.
You can have multiple triggers and multiple actions for them.
As Drip has tight integrations with dozens of other tools, you can also select triggers and actions of other apps as well.
The “Rules” feature alone is like a mini-Zapier inside Drip.
The Rules feature comes really handy because building automation for setting simple things is not always feasible.
Drip contains a very powerful JavaScript library for displaying popups on your site and as well as tailoring the website appearance based on the subscribers who’re visiting your site.
For example, if any of your subscribers visits any specific page on your site, you can show them a highly targeted offer or send them an email.
This is really great when you want to send highly-targeted emails to people who’ve browsed through a specific page on your site.
Ever wondered how Amazon occasionally sends you emails when you browse any of their high-ticket products?
With this Drip feature, this is made possible on your site. You just need to install their JavaScript code snippet on your site and you’re good to go.
A/B Testing
Drip allows you to split test campaigns based on:
- Subject line
- “From” name
- Delivery timing
Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow you to split test the content of the email like ActiveCampaign does.
Along with this, you can also add A/B split testing right inside the workflow.
You can see while building a workflow, I’ve added the split test node and branched the path.
When you edit the split test, you can see you can select a number of paths you want to test.
Drip will distribute the traffic evenly to the paths and lets you know which path is the winner once it has enough data and you can pick the winner.
Drip only has the feature to evenly distribute the traffic among the variations. It doesn’t have any other super-advanced conditional splits like that of ActiveCampaign.
Lead capture
Drip has one lead capture mechanism, i.e Forms. You can add behavioral triggers to the forms to make them appear as pop-ups.
Drip doesn’t come with landing page features like that of ConvertKit. For most people, it doesn’t really matter as you probably already have a website with a landing page building mechanism or if you are having an eCommerce store it doesn’t really matter.
You can enter the form headline, text, change the button text, and much more.
You also have options related to orientation, appearance, behavior, and visibility.
Under the behavior section, you can add scroll trigger settings, time triggers and also tweak other settings.
You can also include a link to manually trigger the form in your site.
After designing your form, just click the next button.
Whenever people fill out your form, what should happen? We can define them in the “Rules” tab under the “Forms” section.
Although Drip has some good inbuilt features for lead generation, as I have some advanced needs, I found out that using tools like OptinMonster is more appropriate for more flexibility.
Tracking & reporting
When it comes to metrics, Drip gives you a clear-cut breakdown of all the numbers that matter.
In email metrics, you can see the report data of the individual emails you sent. Beautiful graphs will also be plotted for the data over time so that you can see how long people interact once you send out a broadcast.
You can also view the subscriber growth on your site using the subscriber growth report.
You can also view the unsubscribes report, email metrics, opens by hours, and clicks to links.
It tracks and reports you all the essentials better than some other tools. If you want to make tracking and reporting to the next level you certainly need to make use of Google Analytics, Tag Manager, UTM parameters and other integrations.
Deliverability
Drip’s deliverability is by far the best in the market.
The deliverability alone justifies the price you shell out for Drip. We conducted a deliverability test of the top email marketing software.
The below test is performed with the same variables, using the same tool, and with a mixture of plain text emails, and emails with hyperlinks.
Know more about the deliverability experiment here.
In the first round of the test, we didn’t have SPF / DKIM auth records setup.
Inbox |
Tabs (others) |
Spam |
Missing | |
ActiveCampaign |
63.46% |
12.50% |
8.65% |
15.38% |
Aweber |
69.23% |
8.46% |
22.31% |
0.00% |
ConstantContact |
84.62% |
0.00% |
15.38% |
0.00% |
ConvertKit |
69.50% |
0.00% |
30.40% |
0.00% |
Drip |
93.85% |
0.00% |
6.15% |
0.00% |
GetResponse |
59.23% |
0.00% |
40.77% |
0.00% |
Mailchimp |
82.31% |
1.54% |
13.08% |
3.08% |
Mailerlite |
56.92% |
10.00% |
32.31% |
0.77% |
MailJet |
52.31% |
10.00% |
20.77% |
16.92% |
SendInBlue |
56.92% |
10.00% |
32.31% |
0.77% |
And please note that we had a custom domain, SPF, and DKIM records setup before conducting the following round of test.
Name |
Inbox |
Tabs (promotion) |
Spam |
Missing |
ActiveCampaign |
92.31% |
0.00% |
3.85% |
3.85% |
Aweber |
95.45% |
0.00% |
4.55% |
0.00% |
ConstantContact |
75.00% |
0.00% |
25.00% |
0.00% |
Drip |
100.00% |
0.00% |
0.00% |
0.00% |
GetResponse |
75.00% |
0.00% |
25.00% |
0.00% |
MailChimp |
95.45% |
0.00% |
4.55% |
0.00% |
Mailerlite |
75.55% |
0.00% |
24.46% |
0.00% |
MailJet |
77.28% |
0.00% |
11.37% |
11.37% |
SendInBlue |
77.28% |
0.00% |
22.73% |
0.00% |
In the above test, ConvertKit didn’t participate as they offer SPF/DKIM certificates only for higher plans.
Drip has shockingly got 100% inbox rate, and I was pleasantly surprised.
Integrations
Drip has got a good number of integrations.
As of writing this review, they had around 50+ integrations. All the major CRMs, webinar platforms, are included.
The above is their eCommerce platform integrations. Considering Drip is relatively a newcomer in the game, they’re growing rapidly.
They also have Zapier integration. The number of triggers and actions are simply mind-blowing.
Drip also has integration with Integromat, with much more number of actions, searches, at a much more affordable price and more features than Zapier.
They also have a dedicated webhooks section.
This webhooks feature is really very comprehensive. You can see there are a number of trigger actions which the above screenshot simply can’t hold.
With a little bit of knowledge, you can easily integrate Drip with pretty much any other app that supports webhook without Zapier.
Pricing and support
Drip, unlike ActiveCampaign, has only one plan. All the features that Drip has got to offer are available in that plan.
Their most basic plan costs $49/month.
Unlike other email marketing software, they don’t have a 0 – 1,000 subscriber plan for a cheaper price. This is a big deal for digital marketers who’re just starting out.
Drip comes at a premium price. But it’s still cheaper than ActiveCampaign and others.
Let me explain to you.
In order to get most of the features of Drip with ActiveCampaign, you need to go with ActiveCampaign’s Plus or Professional plans which costs you $99/month and $129/month for up to 2500 subscribers.
Considering that, I would think Drip is certainly cheaper than ActiveCampaign and more refined.
If you are buying Drip, please do so through my affiliate link as it helps me a lot to get more value-added content coming.
Drip FAQs
What is Drip?
Drip is an email marketing and automation platform owned by guys behind Leadpages. It is designed to be a CRM for eCommerce businesses.
Who is Drip most suitable for?
Drip is most suitable for eCommerce business owners and marketers who need advanced automation.
Is Drip better than ActiveCampaign?
When it comes to UI and UX ActiveCampaign feels clunky. But ActiveCampaign has a couple of additional features, especially in automation. You can read the post ActiveCampaign vs Drip to know more.
Is Drip better than ConvertKit?
Both have good UI/UX, but when it comes to advanced automation and features Drip is better than ConvertKit.
Is Drip better than Mailchimp?
MailChimp is more geared towards email marketing newsletters and has basic automation features. But Drip is built for marketing automation and for eCommerce. Refer the post – MailChimp vs Drip to explore further.
Does Drip come with pre-built email templates?
No. Drip doesn’t have any pre-built email templates. This is not a big deal. You can compose your own emails and save them for later use.
Can I split test my automation with Drip?
Yes, you can. Drip offers a very advanced automation split testing feature.
Can I get the tracking reports with Drip?
Yes. Drip gives you detailed reports of subscriber growth, unsubscribes report, email metrics, opens by hours, clicks to links, and many more.
How good is Drip when it comes to split testing?
Like most of the other tools, Drip also allows split testing of the subject line, name, and delivery time.
Does Drip integrate with WooCommerce?
Yes, Drip integrates natively with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, etc.
Wrap up
If you are a serious eCommerce business owner who needs advanced marketing automation, Drip is a no-brainer for you.
As you saw in the deliverability reports, the Drip’s deliverability is by far the best.
Drip also suits more advanced digital marketers who need good automation features. However, in this case, ActiveCampaign is a close competitor of Drip, comes with a couple of more features, but costs a lot.
If you are just starting your online business without any budget, I won’t recommend you Drip as it may be quite costly for you.
I hope you guys found my Drip review helpful.