Drip Review 2021: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly...
Is Drip right for you?
Drip is a relatively new player in the email marketing automation space. It has recently been aquired by the team behing Leadpages (a popular landingpage software) and is making some waves in the market. They have also recently started focusing their efforts on the Ecommerce niche (physical products), but are still being used by a lot of popular info product marketers as well (like Brennan Dunn and Andre Chaperon). What is about Drip that's so great? And where could they improve? How do their features and pricing compare to the competition? Those are the questions we have tried to answer in this Drip review. We hope this review helps you make a good decision!
Our Review Score: 3.3/5
1) Email builder: 4.0/5
2) Email templates: 1.0/5
3) Form building: 3.5/5
4) Segmentation: 5.0/5
5) Automation: 4.0/5
6) Splittesting: 2.0/5
7) Integrations: 3.5/5
8) Reporting & tracking: 5.0/5
9) Support & Community: 4.0/5
10) Ease of use: 3.5/5
11) Value for money: 1.0/5
Drip Review: Main Pro's and Con's
Main pro's
- Drip uses a tag-based system, but also offer a "tags on steriods" segmentation option called "events". It's like tags, but with more contextual information (like time the tag was applied, the price associated with it, etc). You can send out highly targeted emails with this like no other software
- Tailored to Ecommerce businesses who sell physical products. Good integrations with ecommerce platforms like Shopify and pre-built automations for ecommerce stores. But, also used by popular info product marketers & Software entrepreneurs like Brennan Dunn and Andre Chaperon
- Owned by the team behind popular landingpage builder Leadpages, which means the option to build end-to-end campaigns. And because of the new "marketing integrations" tool called "Center" they are developing, you can expect deep integrations with more marketing tools in the future.
- Drip's automations builder looks good and works well
- With Drip you can resend broadcasts automatically to those who didn't open their email the first time
- Reporting offers many options of breaking down statistics.
- Drip offers great support, but we believe they could have been quicker in responding during our Drip review sometimes
- Drip offers "sharable workflows" which are pre-built automations that you can import into your account. This saves you a lot of time. Really cool!
- The new visual email builder (introduced in the summer of 2018) looks great and works nicely
Main con's
- Drip gets really expensive quickly
- Not good in terms of email templates. But with the new visual builder you should be able to create some good ones yourself.
- Form builder is a bit limited in terms of design
- Drip's A/B-testing functionality is quite basic compared to tools like ActiveCampaign. For example: It's hard to A/b test content inside of emails.
Drip Review Rating Details
How does Drip score as a Marketing Automation tool? This is what we've tried to analyze based on our 11-point email marketing automation checklist below. We've not only tried to score Drip on all elements, but we've also included a small summary with the "why". Hopefully this helps you understand the pros and cons inside our Drip review a bit more.
| Feature | Score | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Score | (3.3/5) | Drip has some outstanding features. Their segmentation options, reporting and automations are top-notch. The downside is the high price compared to other tools. |
1 – Email Builder | (4.0/5) | Since July of 2018 Drip has implemented a new visual builder. It's fun and easy to use. Drip has so many features when it comes to setting up automations that you need some time to get acquainted with it. |
2 – Email Templates | (1.0/5) | Not good in terms of email templates. They don't have a good library of pre-made templates. But with the new visual builder you should be able to create some good ones yourself. |
3 – Form Builder | (3.5/5) | Although design options are limited, there are plenty of different form types. What's cool, is that you can customize the visibility and the behavior associated. |
4 – List Management & Segmentation | (5.0/5) | Nothing bad can be said about Drip's segmentation options. After doing our Drip review we must say they are without a doubt the best tool when it comes to segmentation. They go a step further than tags with their "events" feature. It's like tags, but with more contextual information (like time the tag was applied, the price associated with it, etc). This is tags on steroids basically. |
5 – Automation | (4.0/5) | Drip’s automations are centered around user-friendliness and smoothness. It works with ‘rules’ and ‘workflows’, which make setting up simple automations easy. They've also recently introduced ""sharable workflow" "which are basically pre-built automations you can import into your account with 1 click. This saves you a lot of time" |
6 – Splittesting | (2.0/5) | Drip's A/B-testing functionality quite basic compared to tools like ActiveCampaign. For example: It's hard to A/b test content inside of emails, which is easy with ActiveCampaign. |
7 – Integrations | (3.5/5) | Drip integrates with most apps, especially in the ecommerce space. And because they are part of Leadpages, we believe there will be many deep integrations with popular marketing software coming in the very near future because leadpages is working on Center (a marketing integration tool) |
8 – Reporting | (5.0/5) | Best tool when it comes to tracking and reporting. It offers the biggest offering of data and visually it is very nicely illustrated. |
9 – Support & Community | (4.0/5) | Live chat is available during limited hours. You have loads of support articles as well and a good support team which gives good answers. However, we do believe they could have responded a bit quicker during our Drip review. |
10 – Ease of use | (3.5/5) | Pretty easy to set up and start using. Especially the automation part because of their "sharable workflows" which are pre-built automations you can import into your account. |
11 – Value for money | (1.0/5) | Price is the worst feature of this software. They have recently retired their free forever plan and increased their relatively high prices even further. They've got some great features, but we have to score the pricing like this when we compare to other tools. |
Drip Pricing
We can't leave out the pricing in this Drip review. So below you can check out the overview of the pricing of Drip email software. Drip pricing is a bit too high if you ask us. They do offer a lot of cool features but their cheapest plan is already quite expensive. And once you get a lot of subscribers this tool starts getting even more expensive pretty quickly compared to other tools. Below you can find the prices of Drip based on the amount of contacts you need to manage.
We try to update the pricing as best we can in this Drip review. However, the pricing as listed on this page might be different from the prices listed on the ESPs official site due to changes.
| 1.000 contacts | 10.000 contacts | 25.000 contacts | 50.000 contacts | 100.000 contacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lite plan | Lite plan | Lite plan | Lite plan | Lite plan |
| $49/per month Free migration | $184/per month Free migration | $370/per month Free migration | $680/per month Free migration | $1300/per month Free migration |
| 14 days free trial Free migration | 14 days free trial Free migration | 14 days free trial Free migration | 14 days free trial Free migration | 14 days free trial Free migration |
See all Drip's plans
We try to update the pricing as best we can in this Drip review. However, the pricing as listed on this page might be different from the prices listed on the ESPs official site due to changes.
Drip Features (Marketing & Sales)
We've compiled some of the most important marketing and sales features from this Drip review in the table below. Be sure to check out the B2B features as well, because this is highly relevant for you if you have a salesteam. Stuff like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system might be necessary for you so you can automate a big chunk of you sales process. Check it out:
Want to see which Email Marketing Service scores best? Check out our top-to-bottom Best Email service provider ranking overview.
| ActiveCampaign | AWeber | Constant Contact | ConvertKit | Drip | GetResponse | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing Features | |||||||
| Native Conversion tracking | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Web activity tracking | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| Splittesting Campaigns | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| Splittesting Automations | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Dynamic Personalized Content | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| Multichannel Attribution | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Site Messaging | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Facebook Integrations | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| SMS Integrations | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Webinar integrations | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 |
| Native Landingpage builder | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| Native Shopping Cart | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Sales & CRM Features | |||||||
| Leadscoring | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Native CRM System | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Task Management | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Realtime Sales alerts | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Gmail integration | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Mobile App CRM | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Create quotes & invoices | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
Who is Drip right for? It's great when...
#1 You are an E-commerce company and sell physical products
Drip integrates very well with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, and the pre-built automation workflows you can import are mostly designed for ecommerce businesses. Their ECRM gives you the ability to heavily segment your subscribers and customers for highly targeted campaigns.
#2 You want outstanding targeting & segmentation capabilities
One of the best features of Drip is the way you can apply tags based on behaviour, which is without a doubt better than all tools out there. And with their "events" feature you can add context to your tags (like the moment they were applied, the value of the event (purchase price) and much more. Events are tags on steroids which makes your campaigns and automations super targeted.
See also: Sales funnels | Book funnels | Challenge funnels | Ecommerce funnels | High ticket sales funnels | Lead funnels
#3 You need thorough tracking and reporting
The way Drip illustrates the data is very clearly and attractively done, and the data is very comprehensive. For instance, Drip shows you how conversions, conversion rate ánd much revenue you make per campaign inside of the dashboard. This sounds normal, but is very difficult to achieve with most other tools. You would need to check Google Analytics and rely on third party tracking instead of Drips native conversion tracking.
It's not so great when...
#1 You are on a tight budget
All plans are among the most expensive out there. They used to have a free forever plan, but they have retired that plan. Drip starts at $49 for up to 2500 subscribers, which is quite high compared to other tools. They also get really expensive once you get more subscribers. So if pricing is important to you, you might want to check out some alternatives.
#2 You want a big email templates library for inspiration
Drip offers no email templates at all. You have to build your templates from scratch. You can use their visual builder which works nicely, but if you're looking for inspiration / templates to speed up your workflow this is not the tool for you.
Checkout Drip here.
Drip Alternatives
After doing an in-depth Drip review, we do recommend Drip as being one of the best automation tools out there (although the pricing is a bit much). But we do know that no tool is for everybody. For this reason, we have provided three alternative tools that we believe can be good alternatives if Drip is not what you are looking for. Also, we have provided a short list of the features that could be good alternative features compared with Drip.
Alternative #1: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is definitely the most powerful tool we've review so far. You can easily set up the advanced automations, it has the best A/B-testing out there, plus it has advanced features for marketing ánd sales automation (which is important for B2B). Here are some advantages of using ActiveCampaign over Drip:
- ActiveCampaign is a lot cheaper for all plans (with the same or even more automation capabilities)
- ActiveCampaign has more advanced sales automation features (important if you are in B2B).
- ActiveCampaign has a better A/B-testing. You can splittest everything, even complete funnels and automations
- ActiveCampaign have better support + a free migration service
- ActiveCampaign has a bigger library of different email templates
Alternative #2: GetResponse
GetResponse is definitely one of the better tools we have reviewed. GetResponse scores really well on pricing (very affordable) and on almost all features. However, it doesn't score the best in anything. So if you need the best of the best in a certain area, keep that in mind. However, If your email marketing need are not too advanced, you will probably be happy with this tool!. Here are some advantages of using GetResponse over Drip:
- GetResponse is one of the most afforable option on the market considering their features. Great value for money
- GetResponse has better support
- GetResponse has more sales automation features (for when you are in B2B)
- GetResponse has a native landingpage builder. However, Drip integrates with Leadpages so that's basically native as well.
Alternative #3: Convertkit
Convertkit is easy to use, and suitable for those who just got started, or just need their basic automation needs covered. We would especially recommend Convertkit to bloggers, because the founders were bloggers and created the software with this audience in mind. With Convertkit, you can also create landing pages. Here are some advantages of using Convertkit over Drip:
- Convertkit is way more affordable.
- Convertkit is easier to use for beginners
- Convertkit is focused on bloggers and creators, so if that's you: Go for Convertkit!
- Convertkit has great deliverability
Read Drip vs Convertkit
Read Full Convertkit Review
Conclusion
Drip has some awesome features when it comes to marketing automation, like their segmentation and targeting features. Also, their workflow builder and "shared workflows" are really nice because you can build AND import pre-built automations right into your account. However, it is a really expensive tool compared to other tools like ActiveCampaign (who have the same if not better automation features). In short, our advice is: If you are in eCommerce, go for Drip or Klaviyo. If you need amazing targeting, also consider Drip.
Drip User Reviews
Please leave your own Drip review below. We are always looking for users to give their two cents on this software.
1) What you like about this software?
2) What you dislike about this software?
3) Who would you recommend it to? Who is it best for?
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