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 series email and trigger emails along with marketing automation campaigns.

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.

Mailchimp Automation

Dependencies are getting replaced by powerful tools. Marketers now have the power 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.

MailChimp has now introduced CRM software that helps to build better 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.

Let us review the MailChimp CRM features in details:

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. 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.

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. 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. 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 the marketers but their pricing can be a turn off for some. So, checking out other options is a great thing to do.

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 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.

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.

You can ditch coding as every form on 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 automation will offer you a trimmed down and a precise marketing automation crash course for FREE. An actionable 7-part email course to stay ahead of the curve is a bonus.

Automated Email Campaigns

Send a sequence of emails (Drip Campaigns), do Broadcasts to notify about a new blog or a repeated event, and trigger automated email responses to specific events or actions.

Drip automation

Flexible segment builder helps in identifying the right users for a specific email.

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.

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.

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, view the complete list here.

Maintain a Healthy List

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 keep a check on your cost as well, and maintain a high-quality subscribers’ list.

Everything’s Automated

Drip has 11 triggers and 14 actions in the automation rule builder. This can be used 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. Drip also automatically tracks your subscribers’ activities, and various other performance merits.

Visual Workflow

MailChimp Automation-Drip Visual Work

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 give you error-free workflow.

MailChimp Automation-Six Step Work Flow of Drip

Pricing Plans

Drip review is incomplete without looking at 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.

You get a 14-day free trial to check all the features. You pay $49 up to 2500 subscribers and $122 for 5000 subscribers. The price increases as you increase the number of subscribers. The highest mentioned cost is for 1,40,000 subscribers where you pay $1740 and if you have more than this you will need to connect to their sales team.

These two plans do not include Salesforce Integration and Remove Drip Branding.

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.

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 shift to Drip. Here’s why –

Drip handles “Lists” differently than MailChimp. 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. You don’t have all the emails listed down at one place. In Drip, every email ID ever added is included in the ‘ global list ‘. You can easily create groups and customize your email campaign. However, subscribers who are not active are automatically opted out from the list.

You can tag subscribers based on their activities making it a lot more easier in planning which email to send whom. MailChimp doesn’t have that.

Opt-in forms in MailChimp has to be settled manually to make it appear anywhere on your website. With Drip, you have a ready to paste the HTML code . You can always use third-party integrations to do this.

You can always use third-party integrations to do this. Drip provides just one default email template unlike that of MailChimp. In comparison to Mailchimps variety of email templates, Drip might look a loner; but Drip wins the game with just one template. The default email template in Drip is mobile-friendly and has some nice typography and layouts . The email template will give you a feel of receiving an email from a friend. MailChimp seems to confuse marketers with a host of email template designs but reducing the email performance quality to some extent.

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. You can now request a demo or start using it right away.

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 behaviour-based list segmentation are unique to Aritic PinPoint. It offers integration with various CRM, CMS, social media platforms, websites, and mobiles.

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 and reports.

Aritic Pinpoint is a compact resource catering to every aspect 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 has everything accumulated on one single platform, Aritic PinPoint it is.

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