I enjoy writing articles about email marketing solutions and tools. Email marketing is a very powerful digital marketing strategy that can provide a high return on investment (ROI) for many companies and industries.
When Drip vs MailChimp, the email marketing platforms, compete with each other, how do they exactly perform when compared? This is exactly what I intend to explain in this article. Both, Drip and Mailchimp have their pros and cons and I will try to point them so it will definitely be easier for you to choose the right software for your business.
I intend to classify Mailchimp vs Drip email marketing tools as their last function and discuss the functions they have, the functions they are good at, and the problems that users may encounter when using these email marketing tools.
So without further ado, let’s get started!
MailChimp is among the best known and oldest email marketing tool and still aims to be an email marketing software where you can write and send simple newsletters and marketing emails and get value for the money you invest. MailChimp was established in 2001. It is an old tool designed to enable small business owners to easily send email newsletters and ad campaigns to their audiences or subscribers.
In 2009, MailChimp released its popular free plan, which suddenly attracted the attention of startup owners and bloggers.
Although MailChimp has basic automation functions, it lacks a visual workflow generator and other advanced functions. Drip and Mailchimp are very different software but they have what it takes to have the successful sales you need. The best part of ROI is that you will definitely be in plus and you will get your value for money you invested either in Mailchimp or Drip email marketing tool.
On the other hand, Drip is specifically for marketing automation software. Drip comes with a visual automation builder, advanced features, and some features that are particularly suitable for e-commerce companies.
It was founded by Rob Walling in December 2013. They launched to the market without establishing CRM SalesForce. Drip was recently acquired by Leadpages.
MailChimp and Drip target two different audiences:
- MailChimp: Casual blogger and startup
- Drip: Pro (advanced) marketers, bloggers, e-commerce owners, and marketing automation enthusiasts.
MailChimp is popular mainly because they have a free plan for up to 2000 subscribers. MailChimp is a veteran of the email marketing game, while Drip is relatively new and caused a lot of sensation.
Let’s see a few pro’s and con’s using Mailchimp vs Drip:
Mailchimp
Pros:
Free plan, up to 2000 subscribers
- Very good drag and drop email automation builder when creating campaigns
- A/B test is powerful, can carry out traffic distribution and winner selection
- More than 200 native integrations
Cons:
- Doesn’t have vision automation builder
- Doesn’t accept affiliate marketing
- Not suitable for advanced marketing automation ( no segmentation options)
- Features such as multivariate testing and advanced segmentation are only available in its premium package, with a minimum of $299 per month.
Drip
Pros:
- Excellent UI/UX, easy to use
- Marking and segmentation are very powerful
- Built-in subscriber trimming function
- Advanced email marketing automation builder and rules
- Best for e-commerce owners and advanced digital marketers
- Support liquid email templates to send ultra-target email campaigns and broadcasts
- Expired URL feature can increase conversions
Cons:
- The price of the initial plan is $49 per month, which is quite high
- Cannot A/B test the content of the email
- Does not have landing page functionality
Drip is specifically designed for marketing automation. This is ideal for small businesses that want to send event-based emails to their customers. It is also designed to handle only one mailing list per account, so it is very suitable for small businesses, but it is not so good for agencies
On the other hand, MailChimp has a more “old school” feel. It allows the creation of multiple lists and events and also includes a nice number of email templates to help you quickly and easily send professional-looking emails/catalogs, campaigns, store coupons, and other promotional content.
Drip vs Mailchimp features
Drip features
Customer Data
This feature is a centralized platform that can be used to track and use customer data across different channels. There is a huge also benefit from tags, events, custom fields, lists, and some integrations. Overall, with Drip, you can gain a deeper understanding of how customers behave and how to build stronger relationships with them.
Personalization
Under this category, you will find the sub-features that can promise and ensure your customers have a unique experience. These are deep segmentation, behavior-based automation, and tools that can personalize the customer experience. With in-depth segmentation, you can use tags, events, and custom fields to view the effect of the online store. Second, with behavior-based automation, you can wait for the best time to interact with people. Finally, a personalized experience is a way to ensure that customers can recognize your content and make them look back.
What Drip can do for you?
- Assist in creating personalized email campaigns for your customers
- Tag users based on various custom categories
- The ability to gamify user experience through email funnels
- Track classified emails and funnels
- Create a customized scoring system based on user operations to evaluate the strength of its potential customers
- Drip feed content and alerts to users based on user behavior
- Cross-platform marketing funnel through mobile phones, tablets, desktops, etc.
- Advanced segmentation
- Conversion tracking dashboard to track overall performance
Email builder
Since 2018, Drip has implemented a new visual email builder and it is fun and easy to use. Drip has many functions in its automation and campaigns, and you will need some time to become familiar with it and see it’s benefits.
Email templates
It’s not that good in terms of email templates. They do not own a library of pre-made templates, however, with the new visual email builder, you should be able to create some nice looking email templates yourself.
Form builder
Even though Drip’s design options are limited, there are quite a few different form types. The coolest thing is that you can customize its visibility and related behaviors.
List management and segmentation
Drip’s segmentation options can be said to be a good choice. After the review of Drip, I must say that there is no doubt that they are the best tool for segmentation. They even go one step further than tags with “events” functionality.
Drip’s segmentation is based on tags. We understand that everyone has a unique experience-everyone comes from a different source, takes different actions, and is interested in different things. Although tags are not only unique to Drip (other online email marketing platforms also use tags), the level of automation that can be achieved using tags is.
Since every customer comes from different sources, takes different actions, and is interested in different things, personalized communication should be the top priority of your e-commerce business plan. Adding tags that identify unique actions and journeys to each customer can make each email, workflow, or activity segment as small and broad, based on what are you after. You can tag everyone based on name, date, custom fields, actions they take, and other measures so that you can send emails that are personalized and create good communication for and with them, which actually makes sense for them. You don’t want to be sending emails that are about hiking when they are interested in flying but targeted emails.
Moreover, in order to take segmentation to a whole new level, Drip’s latest Shopper Activity API can be linked to any e-commerce platform and can segment, automate, and send emails based on shopper activities. Segment people based on purchased products and brands, add product details and images to shopping cart discarded emails, and trigger automation based on ordered products.
Automation
Drip’s automation software features focus on user-friendliness and easy to work with. It can be used in conjunction with “rules” and “workflow” to make it easy to set up simple automated processes and send targeted emails. They also introduced “Shareable Workflows”, which are basically pre-built automation features that you can import into your account with just one click. This saves a lot of time”
Split testing
Compared with tools like ActiveCampaign software or e-commerce email marketing automation tool Klaviyo, Drip’s A/B split testing function is quite basic. For example, it is difficult to perform A/B testing on the content of emails, while it is easy to use ActiveCampaign.
With Drip’s latest feature (workflow split testing), you can now see exactly which customer experience can lead to the highest order conversion rate, the highest revenue, or the most website visits. Test the entire workflow or just a little bit of testing to see which strategy is best for your customers.
Integrations
Drip integrates with most applications, especially in the field of e-commerce, but it has Zapier integration and webhook management in their app. And because they are part of Leadpages, there will be many deep integrations with popular marketing software in the near future.
Drip can be integrated with many marketing tools. By default, you already have access to many actions to be added to the workflow.
However, you can get more, including:
- Magento
- WooCommerce
- 3dcart
- Privy Council
- Shopify
- 1Shopping Cart
After connecting to other tools, you can also use them in your workflow.
For example, if you do Facebook Ads, you can connect it to the platform. Then, if the subscriber takes some kind of action, they can be added or removed from the custom audience on Facebook. You can automatically add all customers to your custom audience.
Know when someone will attending a webinar, complete an online course, download an e-book or buy something, and automatically respond with the right message at the right time. Trigger meaningful workflows and email campaigns through actions taken by people in any integrated tool.
Ease of use
Quite easy to set up and get started. Especially the automation part, because they have a pre-built automated “shared workflow” that you can import into your account.
The time between signing up for the Drip plan and starting to use the Drip marketing solution to send email campaigns and automation, is not very long at all and anyone should be able to achieve Drip easily on the first day.
However, some of the users may have a lot of existing data, automation features, and more from their past platforms. If this is the case and you want to help transfer to Drip, customer support will be more than happy to help.
Their ECRM customer success team can help you to understand what other services you might need to set up and send quickly and smoothly. You can use Drip to flexibly find solutions and conduct one-to-one consultations, so we can cooperate at any time according to your needs. Whether you need assistance in training, reviewing, and optimizing automation, recreating workflows, etc.
You can complete all operations and set up by yourself as needed, and whenever you encounter difficulties or questions, you can chat with their support team at any time (online chat time is Monday from 7 am to 7 pm.-Friday).
Value for money
Price is the worst feature of this software. They recently retired from the permanent free plan and further increased the relatively high price. They have some great features, but when we compare with other tools, it is a bit pricey.
Reporting
Drip is the best tool for tracking and reporting. Drip offers the largest data offering and it is well explained visually.
Customer support and community
Online chat is available for limited hours. You also have a large number of support articles and a good customer support team that can provide good answers. However, I believe that they may respond more quickly during this Drip review, but it is not that big a deal when compared to some big email marketing company software support.
Mailchimp Features
How does Mailchimp score as an email marketing automation tool? After conducting extensive research, using Mailchimp for our own marketing purposes, and looking at how this tool stands up with other tools, I wrote this Mailchimp features review so that you can clearly understand the most important features with a short summary.
Email builder
Mailchimp’s editor is easy to use. With its drag and drop interface, you can quickly set up email.
Mailchimp makes it easy to create email campaigns and shows you all the steps you need to take, which makes it suitable for new users. The workflow is not necessarily for everyone, because before designing an email, you must fill in all the details of the campaign (such as subscribers, subject line, and sender address).
In terms of email design features, Mailchimp provides you with plenty of options and flexibility. When creating an email, you can choose:
- Basic layout
- Layout for certain campaign types, such as announcements or product sales
- Template theme
- Write your own code from scratch
You can also easily adjust your template by adding elements such as text blocks, social sharing buttons, videos, and images. From fonts to indentation, colors and shadows and even spell checking, everything can be completely customized to your brand.
Email template
After I reviewed MailChimp, I must say that Mailchimp is a great tool for email templates. There are many kinds, the design looks good and professional, and the editor is easy to use.
Mailchimp is very popular for creating bulk email marketing campaigns, mainly because of the simplicity of designing and launching drip campaigns. Mailchimp provides a variety of unique email design templates for each type of email you wish to add to your drip campaign. You can use templates to receive welcome emails, downloads, product releases, promotions, and more for your bit of activity.
Although the sample templates provided by Mailchimp are sufficient for most needs, there are many other resources available for free professional template design that you can take advantage of in your next bulk email marketing campaign. These 31 free Mailchimp email templates are a great example of building the next promotional drip campaign within your budget, or if you want to be more serious, you may want to consider purchasing an advanced library of Mailchimp templates.
Landing page and form builder
MailChimp comes with options for creating forms and landing pages. With MailChimp, you can build, design, and translate forms. You can add multiple fields to the form, modify field settings, etc.
When it comes to landing pages, you need to first choose which audiences you need to create landing pages for, and there are dozens of templates for you to choose from to generate leads. On the login page, you can customize or add content blocks as needed. Every part of the landing page can be customized.
People who opt-in will even be added to the list of your choice before the landing page is created. On the other hand, with drip irrigation, you can only access the creation of the opt-in form.
MailChimp’s form structure is very good. A nice feature is that you can create pop-up windows.
When creating a form, you can change the text, add or delete fields, set confirmation and post-registration settings, etc.
You can make this form as a widget, embedded widget, or pop-up window. You can use the above settings for playback to display the form as a pop-up window based on the behavior and trigger settings.
Unlike MailChimp, Drip does not design a complete landing page function. Mailchimp’s landing pages option is extremely customizable while Drip has limited customization. For this, you may need to use software similar to ClickFunnels or any WordPress WYSIWYG page builder. You can apply tags or send activities or perform any action on each submission form.
List management and segmentation
MailChimp lacks support for marking and segmentation. Mailchimp is still very list based. Yes, you can use tags, but only inside the lists. Basically, this means that your campaign will not be as targeted as you would expect it to be without a big workaround.
Segmentation in Mailchimp is based on audiences (previously called lists). This means you can create an audience for every segment you want. For example, Audience A might include people who initiate a workflow for customers, while Audience B might include people who live within 25 miles of a physical store.
If you want to send an email to everyone in two audiences, you might be charged twice for each person who happens to belong to these two market segments. If you need to completely separate your audience segments, then this arrangement will work well for you (for example, if you have two accounts, you want to do email marketing, and you need to keep customers apart). However, if you need to integrate people in your audience, you risk sending one email to two audience segments at a time.
Split testing
Mailchimp’s split testing (also known as A/B testing) is limited. You can do split testing with the test subject line, content, sending time, and form name. But you cannot split test the complete email automation or individual emails within the automation.
Similar to Drip email marketing automation, Mailchimp also has a system that can tell you your customers’ purchase intentions. Mailchimp uses a system called “contact ratings”. A five-star scale that shows you how engaged someone is (five stars indicate your most engaged customers). Mailchimp uses its own formula to determine which behaviors are worthwhile and then uses their average behind-the-scenes score to create the person’s star rating.
For example, opening an email may be worth one star, while filling in a Lead Ad may be worth three stars. If the X people take these two actions, then they will become the two-star leads.
Integration method
As far as I know, there is no application that does not integrate with MailChimp (including Zapier integration, of course).
Mailchimp’s integrated library contains hundreds of tools. Some are integrated with Mailchimp, while others are implemented through third-party platforms such as Zapier integration or PieSync.
However, what is annoying about Mailchimp is that it no longer integrates directly with Shopify, one of today’s largest e-commerce platforms. If you want to connect two accounts, you must go through a third-party application.
Easy to use
You do not need too much time to use all its functions. Its working principle is very simple and straightforward.
Reporting
If MailChimp has no restrictions based on your plan, it should receive a rating of golden 5! All in all, its visuals are very good, and the amount of data that can be collected is huge.
- Customer support and community
The support I received during the MailChimp review is reliable. This includes ticket-based support systems and live chat.
- Value for money
Mailchimp has a competitive price, but once you get a large number of subscribers, the price will become expensive (especially considering the lack of good automation features, and you will need it if you have a large number of subscribers).
Facebook, Drip, and Mailchimp
Drip is to make sure you have the opportunity to connect with all customers, no matter where they spend their time, now the platform allows you to reach customers outside of your inbox. Therefore, if social media like Facebook is not a specific customer jam, you can now interact with them through multi-channel workflows, SMS text messages, or even old-fashioned direct mail.
Mailchimp can also work with Facebook but in a different way. Inside Mailchimp, you can create Facebook ads (including selecting an audience and setting a budget) and track the effectiveness of these ads. This is very suitable for generating potential customers and creating beautiful ads.
You can also add a signup form on the Facebook page and integrate Facebook Lead Ads with Mailchimp, but it can only be achieved by connecting the two applications through the third-part Zapier integration.
Pricing
Mailchimp pricing
Mailchimp has a free pricing plan, in addition to a three-tier paid (a month) pricing plan. This free plan allows you to send up to 10,000 emails per month (so you can send five emails to a list of 2,000 subscribers). If you need basic contact management, template selection, email, and landing page design, and have fewer than 2000 subscribers, then the free plan is sufficient. The basic plan allows you to send up to 500,000 emails per month, while the standard plan is 1.2 million and the premium plan is 3 million.
The starting price is free. Up-to 2k contacts/ subscribers.
Pricing plan:
- For 2.5k contacts $41 / month
- For 10k contacts $149 / month
- For 25k contacts $254 / month
- For 100k contacts $779 / month
- Full feature pricing $99 / month
Drip pricing
And offers 14 days free trial and no credit card required. Below are the pricing plans based on the number of contacts you have.
- For up to 500 contacts – $19/month
- For 2.5k contacts – $30 / month
- For 10k contacts – $80 / month
- For 25k contacts – $155 / month
- For 100k contacts – $475 / month
Although Drip offers more avenues in terms of features, MailChimp is more affordable, user-friendly, and also feasible, especially for casual bloggers and small businesses.
Conclusion
Where Mailchimp wins: If your business wants to insist on sending people one-time broadcast emails, or if you really only need to automate a one or two-step campaign, then Mailchimp is the safe choice for you.
The advantage of Drip: If you are looking for a more powerful automation platform, Drip will outperform Mailchimp. The visual workflow builder makes it easier for you to see where your customers are going, and there is almost no end to the number of triggers you can set to attract users to campaigns and workflows.
In addition to using the form in Facebook Lead Ads to generate sales leads, the integration with Custom Audiences also provides many options, involving triggering workflows and rules, and using Facebook Ads to retarget customers.
Both Mailchimp and Drip win: Both email marketing software check the box to work with your marketing stack, play well with Facebook when it comes to lead generation, and speak in a language you fully understand.
Both platforms can send emails to people in a timely manner, but in order to choose the bill that best suits you, take a closer look at the level of automation your business needs to succeed in the future.
Get Drip if you are running a SaaS startup company and want to use email automation to locate users based on actions such as clicking a specific button or visiting a specific URL, then you will like Drip. It contains all the email marketing automation features you need in a sleek, user-friendly interface.
Get Mailchimp if you want a more traditional email marketing platform with e-commerce and brand design in mind, then you will like MailChimp. Although MailChimp also has email marketing automation features, they are not as comprehensive or easy to use as Drip.