Drip

Avantages: I've seriously tried it all over the past 5 years. From Campaign Monitor, to Get Response. Infusionsoft to Mailchimp. Convertkit, Active Campaign, and that's just the well-known ones. Some for small stints (think 1 - 3 months) others for longer stints (6 - 12). Drip is the only one that I've been using for well over 12 months and am feeling very comfortable with. Down to why this software is great - simply put, most of it's core functionalities are well thought out and easy to use. But then advanced things can still be done even if you're a novice to marketing automation. Sending drip campaigns, setting up subscribe forms and linking with other software to create automatons, all super easily done. Overall is a really well thought out piece of software, and the easiest to use considering its power.

Inconvénients: Some things are quite tricky to do. For example, you would expect to be able to set a simple trigger link in an email, except that requires setting up a completely separate automation. You can't set triggers to happen at certain times, and it can be a pain to get your email template looking good (plain templates are awesome but sometimes you just want to be able to adjust things to make it more personal). Adding call-to-action buttons to emails is also insanely difficult, simply getting the colors to match your own brand is impossible. But all these are minor gripes in the grand scheme of things!

Commentaires: We were able to significantly cut costs from our previous ESP by switching to Drip while retaining most of our functionality (only losing landing pages, but Leadpages offers a good alternative that is still affordable at a fraction of the price). We are in the process of moving to a marketing automation suite only because one problem we encountered with Drip was that it was difficult to synchronize data between our legacy platforms.

Avantages: Drip has the powerful automation features that you often have to pay thousands of dollars more a year for with marketing suite platforms. If you only need the automated email portion and not all the other features, Drip delivers a streamlined experienced that's designed to cater to B2B users that want to utilize nurture campaigns to cultivate and convert leads. Because of this, creating workflows is incredibly simple and intuitive. The platform also has some interesting features you don't find in many other ESPs, such as being able to check a box to re-send emails using a different subject line to contacts who don't open the first one. It also does not deal with contacts in lists, but rather contacts live in only one instance in the platform and rather than using lists to segment your contacts, you use tags. Some may dislike this approach, but I personally find being able to get away from endless lists to be liberating.

Inconvénients: The platform lacks a WYSIWG editor, and only works with html or plain text. While this may be fine for many users, it might be off-putting for those less tech-savvy users who are used to creating and editing emails inside of their ESP. Also, the platform, in my opinion, is deceptively counter-intuitive despite its simple appearances. As someone who has used several of the popular ESPs on the market (Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, Stampready, etc...) I found the process to create and send emails confusing and had to contact support several times initially. This was rather frustrating because at the time they only offered support via email. I understand that they are trying to expand support to other methods however. I like to call someone if I'm having a problem, so the lack of phone support was a miss for me.