Drip Email Marketing Software: Sell Smart With Advanced Automation

Email marketing has an ROI of 4300% (now, it might be even more). Email marketing didn’t die.

If you aren’t doing email marketing or if you are still focused on managing social media accounts or doing SEO like there’s no tomorrow, you are literally throwing money away.

Email marketing is the single best thing you could do for your business. Email Marketing just works. It’s also the reason why I write posts like why you should drop everything you are doing right now and embrace email marketing completely.

Of all the email marketing software you and I are both aware of, there are only a few worth considering: MailChimp, Drip, and Convertkit. Of course, Mailchimp is everyone’s favorite but you could quickly run out of its feature set. Convertkit and Drip are both powerful email marketing tools.

Drip, if you look deep enough and if you work with it for as long as I have, offers the best value for money (especially with the host of features they recently added).

Here’s how Drip email marketing software truly helps you sell products or services smart and with advanced email marketing automation:

Subscriber Timelines

You’d know when an email subscriber signs up, but do you know what that subscriber did before he or she signed up?

Normally, you wouldn’t.

With Drip, however, you get a complete timeline of a subscriber — what your subscribers did before they signed up, the pages they visited and how many times per page, and more. This timeline continues even after your subscribers sign up — what campaigns they received, what tags have been applied to them, and precisely what they did with each email they get.

Think of it as magic.

Visual Automation

We are marketers and not logic gurus. For the life of us, we can’t seem to work with complicated code and APIs to create advanced automation workflows nor do we want to spend any extra time doing that.

Right at the outset, you get Visual automation and the ability to build automation workflows with Drip. You can do these visual automation workflows and build email automation workflows with Infusionsoft too, but we also know that InfusionSoft is also known as “confusionsoft” and that it’s way too much for regular businesses, bloggers, online businesses, and service-based businesses.

Email Automation Workflows

What makes Drip really powerful is the way you can create advanced (or simple) email automation workflows.

Trigger points (event triggers, sign up sources) lead to specific actions, delays, and decisions. Again, based on what subscribers do, you also have options to branch out into simple “Yes/No” paths that you can ease your subscribers into.

Here are a few pre-made visual automation workflows you can check out and visualize as to how they work.

Liquid-based Personalization

Here’s something Drip does that absolutely no other email provider can: advanced personalization.

Drip uses Liquid templating language (popularized by Shopify). As such, you can do some really smart things with Drip with respect to email personalization.

But wait… why bother with email personalization?

According to RichRelevance, personalized emails lead up to 3X in clickthrough rates and in 3.8X in revenue per click. Event-triggered emails or emails that are relevant lead to more than 119% higher click-through rates than the regular “business as usual” emails.

When you send out personalized emails, you are really connecting with your email subscribers. Like, connecting one-to-many at scale. With Drip, you can do this:

• Address people by their names by using something like {subscriber.first_name}. If you aren’t sure if you have the names of all your subscribers, you could do this: {subscriber.first_name | default: friend }
• Use can use bits and pieces of liquid templating language for advanced inclusions such as countdown timers, or showing dates relevant to each subscriber (based on when they sign up, for instance).
• You can edit a single email and add snippets to show up (or not) based on the status of your subscribers. For instance, a piece of content like “Buy my course now” won’t show up for people who already purchased your course. Instead, for existing customers, it’ll say something like, “Liked my course? Please leave a review here”.

Learn more about how you can use Drip for advanced email personalization.

Visual Email Builder

Drip originally only had text-based email styles for us to use. I am a huge proponent for emails written and delivered this way minus the fancy HTML and images since these emails would look more personal (like you are writing to a friend), you get better email deliverability, and your emails would look much less spammy.

If you wanted to use a fully-designed HTML template then, you’d have to depend on an email design specialist or use a tool like Designmodo to create emails in HTML and import them to Drip.

Drip, however, did introduce a “Visual Builder” which is very much like the Mailchimp’s email visual builder that you might be familiar with.

You now have the option of just sending plain-text emails (which I recommend) or build complete HTML-style emails using the Visual Builder.

Shopify + Drip = Magic

MailChimp has always had a great focus on e-commerce. Open up the MailChimp dashboard and you’ll see just how your email marketing contributes to your e-commerce sales. None of the email marketing providers (Including Drip) had that before.

Now, however, Drip has taken a route that’s more e-commerce centric. It’s working to be known as an ECRM (E-commerce Customer Relationship Management) tool instead of just an email service provider.

Featuring deep integration with Shopify, connecting your Drip account with Shopify unlocks powerful benefits for you to use with email marketing:

• Drip natively integrates with Leadpages — so you get landing pages and email marketing software at the same time. Plays nice.
• When you connect Drip and Shopify, your whole order history will be automatically synced — a comprehensive order history means you can beef up your segmentation possibilities. Want to pick out all of your customers who’ve placed more than $100 in orders over the past year? Well, now you can.
• You get complete and detailed records and behavior of visitors. When did visitors first arrive at your Shopify store? What are the pages they browsed? How many visits did it take for a particular visitor before a transaction happened? Earlier, you had to copy a script from Drip and put it on all the pages of your store. Now, it happens automatically.
• Trigger automation within Drip for product page views on Shopify. Say, your potential customer is checking out Leather jackets, send an email about five hours after they are done browsing. It’s like magic, you see?
• Segmenting your customers is powerful, and you can do it easily with Drip and Shopify based on your customer activity. Segments could be just subscribers who grabbed a coupon, customers who purchased product X but not Y, customers who purchased product Z at least 6 times in the last 12 months, etc. Once you tag your customers or segment them, you’ll be able to send completely targeted and relevant emails.

Learn more about how Shopify + Drip Creates Magic For your Business

Direct Integration with Facebook Lead Ads

You can connect your Drip account with Facebook Lead ad campaigns directly by choosing Drip as the CRM from within your Facebook Lead Ads CRM integrations. Leads collected from your Facebook Lead ad campaigns are directly sent to your Drip account so that you can grow your list, nurture your leads, and use email marketing automation to sell your products and services.

On top of that, Drip also allows you to build custom audiences with Facebook so that your email list syncs in real-time with Facebook custom audiences (and this audience is constantly maintained).

As more people join your list, they are automatically added to your custom audiences on Facebook.

Now, you can include your special “email list based custom audience” in your campaigns, create lookalike audiences using this audience, or even exclude these specific audiences from your future Lead ads campaigns.

Automated Lead Scoring

None of the email service providers have anything close to Lead scoring. Lead scoring is like adding a wee bit of gamification to your email list subscribers. By assigning points to specific actions your subscribers take as they join your list, an average lead score is determined for each subscriber.

Based on those lead scores, you can automatically prune or purge your list (by setting up automation or rules), filter subscribers out while sending them messages, and send out special campaigns for those with high lead scores.

The lead score feature alone is worth the monthly fee you pay for Drip. Period.

Conversions & Analytics

As far as analytics go, every email service provider lets you see KPI pertaining to email marketing such as the number of emails sent, how many people you sent your emails to, open rates, click-through rates, click rates, and more.

Drip, however, has a fantastic focus on e-commerce now. Using “conversions”, you can clearly see just the sale transactions resulting from your email campaigns.

Again, you’d have all the data you need based on the actions your subscribers take as in whether they purchased, or purchased for the third time in a row, or if they added an item to the shopping cart and left without doing anything.

Conversions and analytics with both Drip and MailChimp are the best in the industry and there are no second thoughts about that.