Drip Review: Discover the Power of an AI-Based Email Marketing Platform

This review covers Drip as an alternative to Mailchimp for email marketing automation. It emphasizes effectiveness of Drip in personalizing customer interactions through automated marketing tools, highlighting features like email opt-in widgets, automated email campaigns, lead tagging and scoring, API integration, and third-party integrations. The review also compares Drip approach to handling email lists and campaigns with Intuit Mailchimp, noting its efficiency and user-friendly aspects. Drip pricing and compatibility with GDPR and CCPA are also discussed, positioning it as a viable choice for businesses seeking advanced email marketing solutions.

The biggest hindrance for any businesses, whether small or medium, is converting leads to paid customers. The question is not whether you have the best product or services to offer.

It’s more concentrated on- what marketing automation tools you have to market your product or service. When you start with email marketing you come along Mailchimp Automation suite where you can send email Newsletter campaign, Welcome emails and trigger emails along with marketing automation campaigns.

All such emails including the welcome emails help to build connections with your customers.

Marketers are moving from manual to automation. Almost 76 percent of marketers agree that automation of marketing is essential, according to Ascends2’s ‘Marketing Automation Trends survey for 2016. 71 percent of businesses have already adopted automated marketing, of which 36 percent use it extensively. Reports have it that 23 percent of companies are likely to adopt the same in the near future.

Dependencies are getting replaced by powerful tools. Marketers can use segments to communicate with customers on an individual level and to automate a personalized conversation with their users. Be it lead generation, lead nurturing or converting- an automation marketing tool has a solution that encompasses everything.

You can read this post from Sujan Patel which covers about How Automated Email Drip Sequences Drive More Revenue.

Drip Personalized Conversation

MailChimp has now introduced marketing CRM software that make sure that you build healthy relationships with your clients. It will help you to understand your customers better while providing you several ways to reach out to them. 

MailChimp is easy to use for new as well as existing users. You can quickly organize your customer data and put them to good use for marketing purposes. 

Mailchimp CRM
Mailchimp CRM

Let us review the MailChimp CRM features in details: 

  1. A holistic view of audience: With MailChimp CRM, you can view well-segmented customer data at a glance. You can easily use this information to create targeted campaigns and relay them to customers with just a few clicks. 
  2. Powerful segmentation: Now, when you have all your contacts in one place, the next thing that you might need to do is to segment the contacts. The MailChimp Segmentation tool is quite powerful that has a number of tags, segments, and groups that help you create your organizational structure quickly. 
Mailchimp Segmentation
  1. Discover audience behavior: MailChimp offers growth, revenue, and engagement reports to help its users understand how their marketing is faring. It also gives individual insights and patterns to help you improve your marketing efforts. You get to know what actions have brought a surge in your purchases and what are the personal preferences. 
  2. Work on an individual level:  Once you have organized your data and found your customers insights, you can take help of the MailChimp marketing and automation tools and start working on a one to one basis. So, you are sending the right message to the right audience at the right time. 
  3. All in one customer dashboard: You do not have to switch tabs or windows to get details about your customer behavior. It already comes with pre-built segments like common tags, recent sources of growth, and even CLV, which is a great way to manage and plan your marketing efforts. 

MailChimp has been a popular choice amongst marketers for creating their emails campaign but their pricing can be a turn-off for some. So, checking out other options is a great thing to do. Also when creating drip campaigns then other tools have better customization options especially if you are e-commerce.

Update: MailChimp recently joined forces with Intuit in September 2021. Small business owners that use Intuit products can also take advantage of this partnership.

So, you are sending emails that match your audience instead of one size fits all approach.

Mailchimp Intuit Text Generator

Drip Automation Tool

Drip Automation Tool – A Mailchimp Automation Alternative 

The market is full of options. Many tools have been in the market for a longer time, such as MailChimp, Marketo, and Hubspot. Despite being here for quite some time, many new automation tools are making way. One such Mailchimp Automation alternative is Drip marketing tool.

Founded by Rob Walling and launched in 2013, Drip will welcome you with the hard-hitting question prominently put up on the homepage: “why are the tools in this space so ridiculously expensive and, adding insult to injury, so hard to use?

Following with an efficient answer, Drip ensures that you know why you are here. You will love Drip because it exactly knows the pain points and vehemently addresses them for you before you start exploring the tool.

I also covered about Drip in previous post 7 Next Generation Drip Email Apps that Drive Conversion.

Features to explore

The Mailchimp Automation Alterative, Drip allows you to craft every interaction with your leads, trial users and customers like an artisan

Drip marketing automation tool has been put out as a ‘lightweight’ alternative to existing popular drip campaigns and automation tools. How exactly Drip will fit your business is explained elaborately on the homepage itself.

So, we will directly move to the unique features that make this tool a go-getter when you want to create emails campaign.

Email Opt-In Widgets

  • Instantly captures every subscriber on any and every page of your site via the live chat widget.
  • Either use an existing form you have or copy-paste the HTML form markup provided by Drip automation tool to use directly on your website.
  • Retain your users’ attention for few more seconds with a properly-timed pop-up as they are about to exit from your website.
  • If you don’t want to do coding then Drip comes with a public hosted version.

Free Crash Course on Marketing Automation

Mailchimp Automation- Drip Crash Course

Most Live chat pop-ups talk about user support, help and so on. Drip will offer you a trimmed down and a precise marketing automation crash course not at a discount but absolutely FREE. An actionable 7-part email course to stay ahead of the curve is a bonus. It can really come in handy if you are setting up your drip campaign or planning to send an email for the first time.

Automated Email Campaigns

Automated Email Campaigns

  • Send a series of emails (Drip Campaigns), do Broadcasts to notify about a new blog or a repeated event, and create triggered automated email responses to match specific events or actions.
  • With triggered emails you are more likely to get results from your campaigns.
  • Flexible segment builder helps in identifying the right users for a specific email that help improve your campaign results.
Drip-Segmentation
  • Every email sent out goes through the Liquid templating system, which means you can edit your email content for each subscriber if needed before you send it. I think this feature can really be a savior when putting up drip campaigns.

Lead Tagging and Scoring

Drip automation tool automatically tags your users based on their actions and activities, like clicking on any link in email, visiting a page of your website, making a purchase or to any other event you have created for your users. Drip also gives you the option of adding unlimited custom fields like ‘name’, ‘phone no’ etc.


Based on the activities of your lead, Drip automatically generates a lead score, helping you to filter which are the most potential leads for conversion. So, you exactly know the customer needs and accordingly, you can design your drip campaign.

MailChimp Automation-Drip Automation Track Performance

API Integration

Drip has a full-featured Javascript and server-side (RESTful) APIs and outbound webhooks. It also has integration with Segment.com
For more details, check these docs.

Third-Party Integration

Drip has almost a dozen applications integrated in it. Starting with shopping cart applications to CRM and payment gateways- Drip has integrations with Chargify, close.io, Shopify, PayPal, KickOffLabs, ClickFunnels, Demio, Facebook Lead Ads, GetSiteControl, Instapage, Leadpages, LeadsBridge, OptinMonster, Thrive Leads, and many more.

Drip Integrations

Maintain a Healthy List

If you don’t want to be overwhelmed with unwanted emails then Drip enables you to regularly monitor your subscriber list.

You can easily remove users who are not engaging with your emails. This can help you to keep a check on your cost as well, and maintain a high-quality subscribers’ list and create an email drip campaign only for people who are interested instead.

Everything’s Automated

Drip has 11 triggers and 14 actions in the automation rule builder. You can create triggered based campaigns and perform various operations. You can use it for lead tagging, opting leads in and out of email campaigns, record conversions, send these conversions to another application (like a CRM) and much more. 

If you want then Drip also automatically tracks your subscribers’ activities, and various other performance merits.

Visual Workflow

Drip Visual Workflow

This MailChimp Automation alternative has also recently announced Visual Workflows. Now you can craft your entire journey into an attractive visual. This feature is available for every account of Drip.

It’s a six-step matter where you can put in your goals including the if-then logic and splits as required. The visuals are an easy step-by-step compilation to make sure you get error-free workflow.

Drip Workflow Components

Pricing Plans
Drip review is incomplete without looking at the pricing plans it offers. It is a powerful automation tool that offers pricing based on your number of subscribers. You can check the pricing with their draggable widget like below:

Drip-Pricing-Plan

You get a 14-day free trial to check all the features. You pay $39 if you want up to 2500 subscribers and $89 for 5000 subscribers. The price increases as you increase the number of subscribers.

The highest mentioned cost is for 1,70,000 subscribers where you pay $1899 and if you want more than this you will need to talk to their support and connect to their sales team.

These two plans doesn’t include Salesforce Integration and Remove Drip Branding. People who want this integration together might get disappointed.

Users, wide and far, have praised this marketing automation powerhouse tool/app.

Drip has measurably improved the number of new customers I net each month

–  Brennan Dunn, Planscope

Update: October-16 2017; Drip launched the first marketing automation tool which is available for free and can process 100 email contacts per month.

Update: Now Drip is GDPR and CCPA compliant; after 25-May. Now you would be able to add consent forms and detail. Further, you can review the GDPR and CCPA detail from here.

Here is Capterra review on what other people say about Drip:

Drip capterra review

Free Alternative

Free MailChimp Automation Alternative – Drip

Drip Vs MailChimp: Feature Comparison

MailChimp automation tool is definitely awesome and is quite popular too. However, there are reasons more than one why you would love it if you join Drip. Here’s why –

Drip handles “Lists” differently than MailChimp. Like MailChimp requires you to create a list for an email campaign. In case you want to send another email to only a few members of that list, you will have to create an additional list manually and then set up a drip campaign.  

You don’t have all the emails listed down in one place. In Drip, every email ID ever added is included in the ‘global list’. You can easily create groups and create an email customized as per your email campaign.

However, it makes sure that subscribers who are not active are automatically opted out from the list which is very beneficial in terms of creating an effective drip campaign.

You can also perform actions like tags based on their activities making it a lot easier to create an email and plan which email to send to whom. If you want this in your email tool then MailChimp doesn’t have that.

Drip Tags

Check the below image to see what other people say about Drip:

Quora Drip Discussion

Drip is a strong competitor of MailChimp and is a top-class solution for autoresponders. Start building a personal connection with your users, and make the maximum of your potential leads.

The quicker you reach your users, the better are your chances to build a strong customer relationship with customer data. You can now request a demo or start using it right away. 

Drip Customer Data

Since we are still on MailChimp Alternatives, another automation tool that fits as a MailChimp Alternative is Aritic PinPoint. A comprehensive full-stack marketing automation tool, Aritic PinPoint is ideal for small and medium businesses. It is advanced in terms of features including features that are absent in MailChimp as well.

For instance, push notifications, SMS campaigns to global numbers, landing pages, and behavior-based list segmentation are unique to Aritic PinPoint. It offers integration with various CRM, CMS, social media platforms, websites, and mobiles and offers powerful drip campaign features.

High-end marketing automation features clubbed with device responsive templates, dynamic content, and gated video for personalized profiling of leads, smart web forms, website and lead tracking, detailed analytics, designing effective drip campaigns and reports.

Aritic Pinpoint is a compact resource catering to various aspects of the marketing funnel: from identifying and capturing leads to converting them into visitors, customers, and finally promoters. So, if you are looking for a tool that include everything on one single platform with the ease to send and create emails then Aritic PinPoint it is.

Crozdesk Email-Marketing-Leader-Chart

Our Observations

Our Observation of Drip email marketing features:

FactorsObservations
What do We like?Drip has one of the best automation workflows.

Drip has an upper hand over Mailchimp when it comes to marketing intelligence.

The integrations offered by Drip are well crafted where it integrates with Shopify, wooCommerce, and Magento.

Drip can help you increase your conversions if you have a lot of visitors on your website by quickly setting up drip campaigns.
What we don’t like?Drip offers smart automation and if your website doesn’t have a lot of traffic then you won’t be able to benefit from its advanced features. You can always find other more affordable options.
Value for MoneyDrip is not the cheapest tool neither it is expensive if you know how to leverage the automation features. But, if you are looking for basic email marketing features then Drip is slight on the higher end of pricing.
Customer SupportPlenty of videos and tutorials to help you get started with email marketing and creating drip campaigns.
Who should use it?In that case, businesses will need the help of powerful automation that drip offers as it is helpful in setting up a powerful drip campaign. It is also a great option for e-commerce businesses.
Drip AlternativesMailchimp, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, and Getresponse
Our Score4.7/5
Drip email automation tool features

FAQs

Questions related to Mailchimp automation alternatives selection:

Is Drip better than MailChimp?

Drip has certain features that are pretty different as compared to MailChimp. For instance, Drip has a feature of a global list where you get all your email listed in one place. It also has the feature of tag customers based on their activity that makes it easier to create your unique email lists.

How much does Drip cost?

The pricing of drip is based on the number of subscribers you have.
0-2000 subscriber – $39
2001-5000 subscribers – $89

What is Drip eCommerce all about?

Drip ecommerce helps you get deeper insights into your customer data. This software specifically caters to ecommerce platforms. You will exactly know what are your customer’s interests and accordingly, you can personalize their emails and set up a drip campaign or a series of emails.

What does Drip do?

It is a fully functional CRM tool that helps with effective email marketing and helps you set up a drip campaign quickly.

Which is the best email campaign software amongst Drip, HubSpot and ActiveCampaign?

The best email campaign software is solely dependent on your needs. Among the three mentioned Drip is good if you are an eCommerce business with frequent drip campaign needs and ActiveCampaign is a better one if you have complex sales automation. HubSpot is also a great tool and works well for small to medium businesses.

What is a drip campaign?

A drip campaign is a series of emails that are sent out to your customers based on specific action they perform.

Where is Drip based?

It is based in Minneapolis, MN and its parent company is Leadpages.

Does Drip offer an app?

Yes, Drip offers an app that allows you to do all the work.

Is Drip a CRM?

Drip can be regarded as an E-commerce CRM that also offers email automation features. A great option for B2C marketers.

What is an example of a drip campaign?

A welcome drip campaign is set up when a user signs up for a newsletter or another drip campaign if a user purchases an item from your website. The series of emails are set up in a way that it reached the customer at the right time.

Drip Review: Discover the Power of an AI-Based Email Marketing Platform
Drip Review: Discover the Power of an AI-Based Email Marketing Platform

Pritha Bose
Pritha Bose

I am an accomplished content marketing and communications expert with over 10 years of experience in the EdTech and SaaS industries. In my current role as a content marketer, I create engaging stories and campaigns focused on #marketingb2b, #contentdesign, #marketingdesign, #contentmarketing, and #marketingautomation. I have deep expertise in marketing automation, ecommerce tools, email marketing, project management, and content strategy. I have a proven track record of working cross-functionally to build brand awareness and promote products through immersive storytelling and campaigns. Previously, I have led content and communications initiatives for various EdTech businesses and internet products. I am skilled at developing content that resonates with key stakeholders while positioning brands strategically. With my passion for team collaboration and hands-on approach, I thrive at managing freelancers, designers, and engineers to deliver impactful campaigns across digital channels and domains. My breadth of experience allows me to be a trusted advisor to companies seeking to amplify their message and connect authentically with target audiences.

Show all Most Helpful Highest Rating Lowest Rating Add your review
  1. I have recently started my startup and have tried using Mailchimp Automation as well as its alternative Drip. Mailchimp Automation allowed me to setup a marketing automation campaign with the help of which me and my team could schedule which mails to send at what time of the day. Another advantage of using mailchimp automation was that it allowed to design out emails so that they look appealing to the user. It is fairly easy to run email campaigns with mailchimp automation. As far as Drip is concerned, which is an amazing alternative to mailchimp automation, it has a live chat widget which allows to connect with any subscriber which comes on our company’s page and to resolve their queries then and there itself. Just when the user is about to leave my website, Drip automatically pops up a window which will retain users attention for a few time. I agree with all the features which are mentioned in the above post regarding Drip-A Mailchimp Automation Alternative. Filtering potential leads for conversation is the most important feature of Drip. People should definitely look for alternatives of mailchimp automation.

    • Ankit Prakash May 12, 2016 at 4:39 PM

      Hey Amira, great to hear that you have tried both the solutions. Let me know incase you plan to try more alternatives for Mailchimp automation.

  2. Shruti Bongale May 25, 2016 at 4:34 PM

    Hey Ankit,

    This is indeed a reat post about Mailchimp automation alternatives. Really helpful. Thanks.

  3. Mailchimp has become highly costly option with time and the point solution for my business I like to use Drip email campaigns more compared to Mailchimp. Overall email response are also high compared to mailchimp automation solution. So, I am getting to see high conversion and engagement with this new tool.

  4. Exceptionally interesting post on Mailchimp automation alternative I really discovered this lead scoring add-on for Mailchimp which does this in a simple manner. On the off chance that you send a Mailchimp campaign it will manufacture a lead scoring list naturally, it’s a truly cool device to catch up with the low-hanging organic product with this alone on I going to stick with them.

1 2 3 4
Sprout24
Logo